Intuition by Allegra goodman

[lightreads]

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those where I can rattle off a whole long list of good things about this book and Goodman's talent, but my face would still be going '…eh' the entire time. Watch:

The story of a cancer research lab and what happens when one researcher calls shenanigans on the extraordinary results of her colleague. An intensely interpersonal web, where it's not about the conflict and who is right and what the truth is, but instead about these personalities in this high-pressure mixing bowl. It's a book about science by way of being 95% about people -- about their screwups and jealousies and intuitions and desires and money and patience and breaking points. About how that makes science go as much as truth does. The writing has that lucid, pane-of-freshly-scrubbed-glass quality, if you know what I mean. It's not that this book is sympathetic to each conflicting point-of-view. It bypasses that to something more straightfaced and real and tangled. Sort of lifting the knot of people and squinting at it from every direction, watching it go, recording the data. One of the better executions of omniscient writing on a technical level I've seen in a long time.

It's all quite admirable and well-crafted and interesting.

And I just didn't care. Really at all. Shrug. I don't know, it just seems patently obvious to me that the practice of science is fundamentally no different than any other vocation or discipline: it ticks complexly and emotionally and interpersonally. Okay. Next.

I'd probably have cared if this was about a presidential campaign, though. So take that as you will.



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Comments

[cahn]

Hee. Okay. Will add it to the data points when reccing books to you :) I think my love for this book has to do with the idea that science ought to be pure, and at its best really is pure (either Cliff saw something or he didn't; either the data is corrupted or it isn't), but because it's done by humans, is rarely pure. And that tension is something I don't feel in non-science disciplines, where I'm more likely to say what you said ("yes, it's complex and emotional and interpersonal; okay fine").

...That may be just to say that science is the one thing in my life that I've managed to retain some measure of idealism (naivete?) about (as opposed, say, to politics), so there's that.

So who did you think was the (closest thing to a) villain of the book? (I say Cliff, Abigail Nussbaum says Jacob -- which I think has a lot to do with how one feels about science; you will be unsurprised to hear that I never got past the OMG FABRICATING DATA THIS IS TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY WRONG knee-jerk reaction. I mean, I can see why Nussbaum thinks Jacob is the villain, but I can't feel it.)

[lightreads]

I'm with you on that one, but for entirely different reasons. On a purely emotional-reactive level, I flat out did not like Cliff, but quietly enjoyed and really grocked Jacob, even when I flinched and went 'ooh, don't do that.' And I think you can trace that back to their degrees of self-deception and honesty. Cliff has a really impressive ability to convince himself of what he wants to be true. Not just his results, but the icky way he pursued Robin (his coworker! ick!) until she gave in, no matter how often she told him she wasn't interested. And to me, it's not just that it makes him a bad scientist. It makes him the sort of person I frankly wouldn't want to ever be around, because I value self-questioning way too highly.

It's one of the most successful aspects of the book to me, imho, just how thoroughly a job it did at making sure there wasn't an answer -- he got results, he didn't. Robin was reacting to clues everyone else missed, Robin was reacting out of resentment. Such that when various people started swinging around to this or that conclusion at the last, it was really an afterthought. That was very smart to me, for reasons I can't quite put into words at the moment.