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The Body Electric
the reports out of major journals by means of anonymous value judg-
ments from the review committees. You can always find something
wrong with a proposal or manuscript, no matter how well written or
scientifically impeccable it may be.
Determined rebels use guerrilla tactics. There are so many funding
agencies that the left hand often knoweth not what the right hand
doeth. A proposal may get by an obscure panel whose members aren't
yet aware of the danger. The snowstorms of paper churned out by the
research establishment have required the founding of many new journals
in each subspecialty. Some of these will accept papers that would auto-
matically be rejected by the big ones. In addition, there's an art to
writing a grant proposal that falls within accepted guidelines without
specifying exactly what the researchers intend to do.
If these methods succeed in prolonging the apostasy, the establish-
ment generally exerts pressure through the schools. Successful academics
are almost always true believers who are happy to curry favor by helping
to deny tenure to "questionable" investigators or by harassing them in a
number of ways. For example, in 1950 Gordon A. Atwater was fired as
chairman of the American Museum of Natural History astronomy de-
partment and curator of the Hayden Planetarium for publicly suggesting
that Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas should receive a fair hearing. That
same year Velikovsky's first book, Worlds in Collision, was renounced by
his publisher (Macmillan) even though it was a best seller, because a
group of influential astronomers led by Harvard's Harlow Shapley threat-
ened to boycott the textbook department that accounted for two thirds
of the company's sales. No matter what one may think of Velikovsky's
conclusions, that kind of backstairs persuasion is not science.
As the conflict escalates, the muzzled freethinker often goes directly
to the public to spread the pernicious doctrines. At this point the gloves
come off. Already a lightning rod for the wrath of the Olympian peers,
the would-be Prometheus writhes under attacks on his or her honesty,
scientific competence, and personal habits. The pigeons of Zeus cover
the new ideas with their droppings and conduct rigged experiments to
disprove them. In extreme cases, government agencies staffed and ad-
vised by the establishment begin legal harassment, such as the trial and
imprisonment that ended the career and life of Wilhelm Reich.
Sometime during or after the battle, it generally becomes obvious that
the iconoclast was right. The counterattack then shifts toward historical
revision. Establishment members publish papers claiming the new ideas
for themselves and omitting all references to the true originator. The
heretic's name is remembered only in connection with a condescending