Peer review needs context

I believe the scientific peer review process deserves discussion in a broader context than it has received thus far (see previous letter by Jan Merks in T.N.M., Dec. 2-8/02 and by David R.M. Pattison in T.N.M., Dec. 23-29/02).

Dr. Pattison notes that this tried-and-true system occasionally fails. His example, the fraudulent research on organic microchips that slipped through the process, suggests that it fails only on the side of generosity in the acceptance of new ideas.

I suspect Dr. Pattison is too young to have experienced the ugly, career-destroying “debate” that surrounded the idea of “continental drift” as far back as the 1960s. After decades of burial by a hostile and not very scientific geological peerage, new data emerged that made it impossible to suppress the idea. Many brave adherents at this time either lost their jobs with universities, oil companies, and the like, or were overtly threatened with it. Science is rather more “centrally planned” than free.

That the continents had broken up and drifted was suggested around 1800 by the German naturalist Baron Friedrich von Humbolt (1769-1859), who noted the match of the African and South American coastlines. This received little attention until 1915, when a complete theory using masses of paleontological and geological data was presented by Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a German meteorologist.

Reaction from the geological establishment was swift, boorish and petty. Wegener, was roundly vilified for this heresy and “invited” to the 1926 annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists to face his critics. He declined to attend what to him must have been akin to a hearing before a synod of medieval bishops. The AAPG president gave a tirade that included remarks to the effect that “if we are to accept Wegener’s continental drift theory, we would be obliged to consign to the waste basket much of the body of geological knowledge gathered over the past century . . .”

We had to delay this consignment for another 40 years.

The scars from this disgraceful period in the history of geology are still to be seen. The elegant self-explanatory term “continental drift” has been unceremoniously buried and, as a face-saving tactic, replaced by the clumsy, obtuse “plate tectonics,” which seems better-suited to orthodontics. Poets we earth scientists are not. Wegener, who brought to light the crown jewel of earth science, died in scientific purgatory in 1930. I caution Dr. Pattison not to think this could not happen today. Virtually all of science now is mission-oriented, with the body of knowledge accreting in tiny bits. If and when a truly earth-shaking theory comes along that makes obsolete the status quo, the peerage is unlikely to be more enlightened than it has been.

Peer review can indeed be the problem.

Gary Pearse

Ottawa, Ontario