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The Body Electric
weighted in favor of the establishment that it impedes progress in health
care and prevents truly new ideas from getting a fair hearing in almost
all circumstances. The present system is in effect a dogmatic religion
with a self-perpetuating priesthood dedicated only to preserving the cur-
rent orthodoxies. The system rewards the sycophant and punishes the
visionary to a degree unparalleled in the four-hundred-year history of
modern science.
This situation has come about because research is now so expensive
that only governments and multinational corporations can pay for it.
The funds are dispensed by agencies staffed and run by bureaucrats who
aren't scientists themselves. As this system developed after World War
II, the question naturally arose as to how these scientifically ignorant
officials were to choose among competing grant applications. The logical
solution was to set up panels of scientists to evaluate requests in their
fields and then advise the bureaucrats.
This method is based on the naive assumption that scientists really are
more impartial than other people, so the result could have been pre-
dicted decades ago. In general, projects that propose a search for evi-
dence in support of new ideas aren't funded. Most review committees
approve nothing that would challenge the findings their members made
when they were struggling young researchers who created the current
theories, whereas projects that pander to these elder egos receive lavish
support. Eventually those who play the game become the new members
of the peer group, and thus the system perpetuates itself. As Erwin
Chargaff has remarked, "This continual turning off and on of the finan-
cial faucets produces Pavlovian effects," and most research becomes mere
water treading aimed at getting paid rather than finding anything new.
The intuitive "lunatic twinge," the urge to test a hunch, which is the
source of all scientific breakthroughs, is systematically excluded.
There has even been a scientific study documenting how choices made
by the peer review system depend almost entirely on whether the experts
are sympathetic or hostile to the hypothesis being suggested. True to
form, the National Academy of Sciences, which sponsored the investiga-
tion, suppressed its results for two years.
Membership on even a few peer review boards soon establishes one's
status in the "old boys' club" and leads to other benefits. Manuscripts
submitted to scientific journals are reviewed for validity in the same way
as grant requests. And who is better qualified to judge an article than
those same eminent experts with their laurels to guard? Publication is
accepted as evidence that an experiment has some basic value, and with-
out it the work sinks without a ripple. The circle is thus closed, and the