http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.html

October 28, 2007

Ideas & Trends

Bright Scientists, Dim Notions

By GEORGE JOHNSON

AT a conference in Cambridge, Mass., in 1988 called "How the Brain Works," Francis Crick suggested that neuroscientific understanding would move further along if only he and his colleagues were allowed to experiment on prisoners. You couldn't tell if he was kidding, and Crick being Crick, he probably didn't care. Emboldened by a Nobel Prize in 1962 for helping uncoil the secret of life, Dr. Crick, who died in 2004, wasn't shy about offering bold opinions - including speculations that life might have been seeded on Earth as part of an experiment by aliens.

The notion, called directed panspermia, had something of an intellectual pedigree. But when James Watson, the other strand of the double helix, went off the deep end two Sundays ago in The Times of London, implying that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on.

Since the publication in 1968 of his opinionated memoir, "The Double Helix," Dr. Watson, 79, has been known for his provocative statements (please see "Stupidity Should be Cured, Says DNA Discoverer," New Scientist, Feb. 28, 2003), but this time he apologized. Last week, uncharacteristically subdued, he announced his retirement as chancellor and member of the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he had presided during much of the genetic revolution.

Though the pronouncements are rarely so jarring, there is a long tradition of great scientists letting down their guard. Actors, politicians and rock stars routinely make ill-considered comments. But when someone like Dr. Watson goes over the top, colleagues fear that the public may misconstrue the pronouncements as carrying science's stamp of approval.

Kary Mullis, after grabbing a piece of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, dove head first off the platform, expounding on the virtues of LSD and astrology and expressing his doubts about global warming, the ozone hole, and H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS. On the latter point he was following the lead of Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who still insists that AIDS is caused by recreational drug use and even by one of the pharmaceuticals used for treatment.

Iconoclasts at heart, the best scientists are faced with an occupational hazard: having left their mark on one small patch of ground, they are tempted to stir up trouble elsewhere.

"With my own advancing years, I'm mindful of the three different ways scientists can grow old," Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and president of the Royal Society, wrote in an e-mail message. The first two choices are either to become an administrator or to content yourself with doing science that will probably be mediocre. ("In contrast to composers," Dr. Rees observed, "there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.") The third choice is to strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory - and quickly get in over your head. "All too many examples of this!" he lamented.

Creationists still gleefully pounce on a quote from the Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who late in his career compared the likelihood of a living cell arising through evolution to "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard" and assembling a Boeing 747. This caricature of the evolutionary process led to the coinage of the term Hoyle's Fallacy. Dr. Hoyle also promoted the notion that epidemics are caused by viruses hitchhiking on the tails of comets.

Sometimes the wandering from one's home turf extends all the way to the paranormal. In 2001, when officials of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a package of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Nobel Prize, they sought the counsel of Brian Josephson, who shared the prize for physics in 1973 for his superconductivity research. Physicists across Britain recoiled when an official pamphlet accompanying the stamps predicted that quantum mechanics might lead to an understanding of mental telepathy.

"Perhaps we should have checked that," a spokeswoman for the Royal Mail told Nature at the time. "But if he has won a Nobel Prize for his work, that should give him some credibility."

With science treading right to the bleeding edge of the knowable, maybe the Royal Mail can be forgiven for mistaking pseudoscience for the real thing. In an article in The Observer of London, David Deutsch, a quantum theorist at Oxford University, dismissed Dr. Josephson's speculations as "utter rubbish." Dr. Deutsch is known for proposing the existence of a multiplicity of parallel universes.

There is a difference of course between bold speculations and Dr. Watson's reckless remarks. In announcing his retirement, in an oddly oblique e-mailed dispatch, he expressed hope that the latest biological research, at Cold Spring Harbor and elsewhere, would lead to treatments for mental illness and cancer. Invoking his "Scots-Irish Appalachian heritage" and a faith in reason and social justice passed on by his parents, he sounded sad and confused, as though this time he had succeeded in dumbfounding even himself.