Book Review : Science Lab Is No Refuge From Conflict, Ego Trips

Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene by Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 375 pages)

Sometimes at the movies it seems that you have to sit through several minutes of credits--a Such-and-Such production of a So-and-So film, and so forth--before you get to the title. The names of the people and their placement in the pecking order sometimes seem to get more attention than the picture that follows.

This concern about massaging people’s egos is hardly unique to the movie business. Look at any organization’s newsletter and notice how much space is devoted to photos of the staff. Or examine the list of authors of an important (or unimportant) scientific paper.

Careers rise and fall on whose name appears and where it appears in the list of contributors--which can include dozens of people who helped with the research. The author list of a scientific paper may be as carefully negotiated as the movie credits. Doing science is as much of an ego trip as making movies.

“As a general rule, the first author is the scientist who performed the bulk of the experiments, and the last author is the director of the lab in which the work was done. The authors in between--and there can be as many as 15 or 20 on major scientific reports--may have contributed anything from hands-on experimental help to a few words of advice over the telephone,” Natalie Angier writes in “Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene.”

This is one of the many insights into the process of science that Angier provides in the course of her lucid description of one of the most important areas of biological research: the role of oncogenes in cancer. In the last decade, microbiologists have discovered what appears to be the molecular basis of cancer, the genetic mistake that causes a cell to go awry and begin its unchecked multiplication that often leads to death.

Precursors of Cancer

Since the discovery of oncogenes in the 1970s, these precursors of cancer have been the object of an enormous amount of research, which has yet to unravel exactly what their role is or how they do their dirty work.

As is the custom in many science books these days, “Natural Obsessions” is as much about the scientists involved in this work as it is about the science. Angier takes us into two of the foremost oncogene research laboratories--Robert Weinberg’s lab at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and Michael Wigler’s at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island--and in the course of her story, she explicates both the facts and the sociology of science.

This is a book about competition and jealousy, about ideas and emotions, about choosing problems to work on with an eye on advancing one’s career. It makes no sense to select a problem whose solution doesn’t matter and won’t make much of a splash in any case. At the same time, the question shouldn’t be so big that it can’t be answered in a reasonable amount of time.

Science’s Larger Picture

“For young scientists,” Angier writes, “any results are better than no results.”

But the really good results are the ones that suggest a larger picture and lead to further work. “Weinberg always encouraged his people to consider the broader implications of their experiments,” she says. “A result is worth something only if you know what you’ll do with it when you discover it.”

The young and not-so-young scientists who people this book exist in the tension between advancing knowledge and advancing their careers. Which is not to say that these poles pull in opposite directions. Far from it. Frequently one advances one’s career by advancing knowledge, which is why the system works in the first place. (This applies to capitalism as well as to scientific research: If everyone acts out of self-interest, the results are frequently beneficial to many others.)

The Right Trade-Off

But sometimes there are choices that have to be made between self-interest and the larger interest. Should a graduate student or postdoc researcher cooperate with a colleague by sharing cell lines, one of the basic necessities of work in microbiology? When should laboratories share their findings with rival laboratories? What is the proper trade-off between being cautious and being first?

These are some of the subthemes that reverberate through Angier’s book as she leads the reader by the hand through the world of microbiology and cancer research. For in science there is almost always a great deal of content that is the heart of the work, the reason for all of the activity and the human drama.

Precise Explanations

Though they have not yet lived up to their original billing as the solution to the mystery of cancer, oncogenes remain a very important field of research that may yet hold the key. Angier is precise and patient in explaining what is known and how it is known. She gets inside the thought processes of researchers and explains how they design and perform experiments to press the frontiers of knowledge.

When science is written only from the point of view of results (the gee whiz of discoveries), the implication is that research leads in straight lines to breakthroughs. In fact, the process of science is unstructured, unpredictable and frequently uneventful. Angier’s book makes that clear.

At base, she likes scientists very much, and that affection shines through. Their work is important and exciting, and that is also clear. Her book can be read almost as a textbook of oncogene research. But it is much more than that. It is a motion picture of science in progress.