The following article was written by Deirdre Macken and was published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age Newspaper’s Good Weekend Magazine on Nov.16, 1991. Reproduced with permission.
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SCIENCE FRICTION
They call themselves, with great pride, feral scientists. They wander from their specialisations into the territory of other disciplines in the hope of finding greater understanding and relevance. And like all radicals, writes DEIRDRE MACKEN, they’ve also made their share of enemies.
JUST BEFORE Christmas last year, 150 scientists and intellectual groupies from around Australia converged on the hot and near-deserted campus of the University of Sydney for a conference.
It was fortunate that students had left for summer because what began as an annual talk about the soft side of science was overtaken by a spirit of rebellion that threatened the very intellectual framework around which the university had been built. For three sweaty days, the walls of this esteemed university echoed with scientific heresy.
The organiser of the Centre for Human Aspects of Science and Technology (CHAST) conference, Associate Professor Alex Reichel, knew the conference would be controversial because on centre stage was a British biologist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose ideas placed him on the very edge of science.
Sheldrake’s theory that nature has a memory, that there is a field of communication between people, between like species and between like matter, is controversial enough — when he proposed it, Nature magazine said his book should be burnt. But it is Sheldrake’s demand for a whole new approach to science that is just as challenging to established science and that won him so many soul mates at the conference.
When he stood up there and tagged himself a feral scientist, it struck a chord. The image of the domesticated scientist going into the wild embodied the experience of so many others that the term became a catch cry for the conference. Delegates and speakers recall boasting with colleagues in the cafeteria that they, too, were feral. There was a feeling of being part of a pioneering expedition, a camaraderie of confessors: “It’s where I came out of the academic closet,” says one.
The scientific putsch came at a cost, in particular the job of the organiser, but it also lived beyond the conference, infiltrating university curriculums, shaping theories and binding colleagues from different disciplines. It was apparent even then that feral scientists were not just roaming the grounds of the University of Sydney. They were roaming the world.
The push for a more holistic approach to science has been gathering momentum for a decade. In what seems almost like spontaneous evolution, the demand for a radical shift in the way we view science was coming from physicists, biologists, psychologists, educationalists and agriculturalists and, although these scientists had come to this conclusion from their own work, the verdict was the same.
The new scientists are nomads, wandering into many different fields of science to get a broader picture. They have stepped back from their microscopes to see organisms in their environments and with their own relationships; they are not afraid of terms such as “purpose” and “meaning”. Most importantly, they want the rigours of modern science to be applied with the open-minded approach of pre-modern science.
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Appearing here was a large photo of Professor Charles Birch with the caption : “Emeritus Professor Charles Birch: ‘I know I was thought of as a crackpot. The vice-chancellor used to say to me,‘How are the eco-nuts today?’ Meaning me.” |
The emerging clash of scientific thought has forced many of the new scientists on to the fringe. Some of the pioneers no longer have university positions, many publish their theories in popular books rather than journals, others have their work sponsored by independent organisations. Their names — Ilya Progogine, Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock, Sheldrake, Humberto Maturana, David Bohm, Ken Wilber are just some — crop up more often at dinner parties than in bibliographies.
But even as the delegates to the CHAST conference were taking their radical ideas home to mull over at Christmas, there were signs that the movement was gathering momentum, that some of Australia’s best-known scientists had found this new approach and, risking their careers, reputations and academic friendships, had also taken a walk on the wild side of science.
As the cleaners moved into the conference hall, Paul Davies, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide, was working on his new book, The Matter Myth, which began “The word ‘revolution’ is rather overworked in science, nevertheless. . .”
At the same time, emeritus professor Charles Birch was leaving the conference somewhat bemused to hear so much support for Sheldrake, with whom he had quietly corresponded for many of the 23 years that he had spent at the University of Sydney.
And Professor John Dwyer, professor of medicine at the University of NSW, was delving into the most ancient style of medical practice as he explored how the mental attitude of AIDS patients affected the course of their disease.
WALKING INTO John Dwyer’s office in a historic section of Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital, it’s hard to imagine this confident, highly regarded academic out in the wilds of science’s frontier. But that’s where he was 11 years ago. The turning point in his approach to medicine came while he was head of the clinical immunology section at Yale University.
As he relates his story it is worthwhile noting that his breakthrough occurred only, firstly, because he was exposed to work by scientists outside his field; secondly, because he was in an environment designed for the discussion of novel ideas and finally, because he had the nous to listen to intuition.
At a conference in 1980, Dwyer learnt of an experiment in which veterinarians had administered an immuno-suppressive drug and saccharin to an animal a number of times and observed the immune system being suppressed. They then administered saccharin alone and the immune system was again suppressed — they had tricked the animal’s immune system into auto-suppression.
“It really struck a chord,” says Dwyer. “Like most physicians, I knew there was something about personality and the ability to handle ill-health; I’d observed it so often in patients but I would never have thought of doing an experiment to try to prove it.”
Shortly after this, he attended a conference organised by the MacArthur Foundation, which had been set up to sponsor novel ideas. Sharing the hall with experts from all areas of human and animal health, Dwyer recalls that “we let our minds wander over everything. It was just fascinating. We all walked away forming scientific collaborations and thinking of experiments we’d like to do. I went back with the professor of psychiatry and we decided to do an experiment on the physiological effects of bereavement.
“I don’t think we were considered fringe but others were worried that we were crossing boundaries — for example, I knew nothing about the psychiatric scales of measuring personality and my colleague knew nothing about T-cell circulation. Moreover, that field was in disgrace because most of the work that had been done on the mind’s interaction with the body was rubbish, sheer unadulterated rubbish. But I was egotistical enough to think I’d been trained well enough and was working in a good institute with good people [and that I’d] be taken seriously.”
Dwyer’s intuition that the health of a person is entwined with the mind was confirmed by his first experiment, and his second, and the subsequent experiments that have been done in this mushrooming field of medicine. Later, it occupied a chapter in his book The Body at War and it is the focus of both his clinical and academic work today.
Describing himself as a holist — although he cringes at the word’s New-Age connotations — Dwyer says medicine is simply going back to its roots. “If you look at Hippocrates, you see there’s nothing new under the sun. Those ancient scientists, who had nothing except observational skills, came up with all these ideas about personality and health. We got too clever for ourselves. Perhaps it was inevitable that we went through a stage where we had to do what we did — to look at how livers worked, et cetera — but we took it so far that we began treating patients as livers or heart diseases rather than people. To make progress in the future, this multi-disciplinary approach is essential. Right now I talk with endocrinologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. But maybe in a few years I’ll be talking to mathematicians, botanists and physicists as we throw the net of shared knowledge wider.”
If Dwyer has a misgiving about the scientific revolution that he describes as “turning the lens back on the camera to get a broader picture”, it is that science becomes prey to quacks who distort new theories and ignore the rigours of research. “It is crucial,” he says, “that the new approach is done with the same discipline that you would bring to answering a question on how blood gets filtered to produce urine. It has got to be rigid. That’s the challenge.”
Although quacks spread like viruses in the new areas of medicine, they’re not confined to cancer wards. Over in Adelaide, Professor Paul Davies fears that pseudo-scientists are endangering the shift towards a more holistic approach to physics.
DAVIES MIGRATED to Australia last year to escape what he describes as the philistine society of Thatcher’s Britain. He brought with him an international reputation, a string of 18 popular books and a commitment to the sharing of scientific knowledge that last month won him the Eureka Prize for the Promotion of Science.
Like so many other “new scientists”, Davies’s books are designed to be read by everyone. Indeed, in most bookshops, the new scientists monopolise the science shelves. Their books present science as life. Some say they represent a romantic movement and, as former Minister for Science Barry Jones says, they are immensely appealing to the public.
“The primary characteristic of contemporary science is super-specialisation,” says Jones, “and because of that, when someone starts to pull out the big picture and link everything together, a lot of scientists get the horrors. To generalists like us, we see these big-picture theories as exciting, thrilling, but a lot of scientists look disapproving and say, ‘You dare not link those things together.’
“Partly, it’s a matter of changes in fashion. In the time of Einstein, there were a lot of scientists around who were very much into epistemology — they said, ‘Here’s the big picture and here’s how my specialisation fits into it.’ But there are comparatively few of those around today. I think it’s a pity because it makes science hard to sell. A lot of people are yearning for the big picture. They say, ‘Where’s the T-shirt? Where’s the bumper sticker that tells it all?’ The splitters of science say there is no T-shirt.”
Using the medium of popular books (he hasn’t quite got his theory down to a T-shirt message), Davies throws down the gauntlet to his colleagues. In his latest book, The Matter Myth, he says “this monumental paradigm shift is bringing with it a new perspective on human beings and their role in the great drama of nature. There is a profound transformation in the way that scientists view their world . . . black holes, quantum ‘ghostliness’, chaos and thinking computers are just the tip of a huge iceberg.”
But Davies is not only trying to push science beyond the parameters of reductionism or mechanism — that is, treating the world as a giant machine that can be explained by breaking it down into its smallest parts — he is pushing science beyond physics, literally into the metaphysical.
“The sort of stuff I write about is by and large taking the party line and saying what implications does this have for our view of the universe, why we’re here and what it means. And if you look at the history of science, there is a long and honorable tradition of drawing those metaphysical implications from science. One of the things I like to do is to go back to the origins of physics and see how it emerged from theology and other branches of philosophy. What we call science now is, in a sense, applied theology — the notion of the laws of physics goes right back to the concept of God the law-giver.
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Appearing here was a large photo of Professor Paul Davies with the caption : “Many biologists get hot under the collar about my work. They are sensitive about anything that appears to undermine the central dogma of biology.” |
“But the backlash against holism is partly due to those people on the edges of science, who many regard as pseudo-scientists, who rejoice in the rediscovery of holism.”
While Davies is still within the civilisation of a university, he criticises the fact that “universities draw rigid boundaries around subjects and a lot of the exciting new work tends to transcend these traditional boundaries. Climatology, for instance, demands input from many different areas. Chaos is a classic example of a multi-disciplined approach.”
Holism is not necessarily harmonious. Scientists who agree that a new approach is needed often do not support each other’s particular theories, nor do they always agree on how to implement the new paradigm. One scientist who was approached for this story declined to be involved because he said the others were not on the right track — his track.
Nevertheless, they concur that our universities are not catering for the new paradigm and that scientists who try to tackle radical ideas that weave across different disciplines cannot get funds for research, much less intellectual support from colleagues.
ONE SCIENTIST who spent the latter part of his career banging heads with conservative vice-chancellors is emeritus professor Charles Birch. Birch has just returned from an overseas conference where scientists had gone beyond the theory of the new paradigm and were trying to implement it. “It’s so embryonic; there are only tiny pockets around the world where scientists are trying to cope with it. I’ve just been to a conference where a group of straight, hard-nosed scientists were trying to talk about ethical issues arising out of their own work but everyone had a different point of view [and] they didn’t know how to do it. But at least they were trying.”
Birch is renowned as one of the few scientists who have tried to cross the great divide between science and religion. This theological approach to nature is most apparent in his latest book, On Purpose, in which he argues that everything in nature, from protons to people, has a purpose. But for most of his career, he had to juggle the demand for classical teaching in a conservative university with his insatiable curiosity for a meaningful science.
“My problem was that I was brought up to study the living organism as a machine but that never told me anything about the most important thing to me, feelings. I felt a frustration about that, particularly as I had fairly strong religious views that didn’t mesh with this machinery viewpoint. So I decided pursue it and discovered there were other people in the world who had also decided that mechanisation was only one aspect.”
For years, he exchanged his radical views with like minds across the world. He corresponded with people such as Sheldrake (although he does not accept his theory) and John Cobb (who wrote Mind in Nature); he sought contacts through the Club of Rome (an international think-tank set up in 1968) and he travelled to lectures around the world to alleviate his loneliness. “I was terribly lonely at times,” he says.
His loneliness arose from his position in the most mechanistic of sciences within the structure of a university that he described almost a decade ago as a tower of Babel.
“The modern university is a tower of Babel because it has no theory of the whole of knowledge. It has different disciplines on different floors and they don’t talk to one another — it’s very different from the ideal of learning.
“The important part of science is being able to relate your thoughts to the rest of the world and scientists, on the whole, are unable to do this. I argued strongly for a course on the philosophy of science at [Sydney] university but students and scientists were not too enthusiastic. I know I was thought of as a crackpot. The vice-chancellor used to say to me, ‘How are the eco-nuts today?’ Meaning me.
“Science is like the Church; it’s a solid rock that is very hard to move and, right now, some of its foundations are being questioned. You can say science has been so successful that it has transformed the world and there’s no question about that, but it has almost nothing to say about the things that need transforming now.”
Although a critic within, Birch says he has been liberated since retiring from university. He is now free to spend his days writing about his theories for the general public, caring for his cat and plants and promoting the new paradigm through the scientific circuit. The annual lecture on the human aspects of science that he endowed with part of his $725,000 Templeton Prize (for progress in religion) featured Paul Davies as inaugural speaker.
But at 73, Birch knows he will not live to see this new approach adopted in mainstream science, much less shape our view of the world. “The new paradigm would involve a major revolution in present science. Eventually it will happen but not in my lifetime — there’s too much resistance.
“You see, if you want to get a Nobel Prize, you work in an area where the answers can be got. We’re working in areas where there’s no indication that the answer is going to come.”
THE RESISTANCE that Birch laments was only too apparent after last year’s CHAST conference. Indeed, by the time students returned this year, the walls had spoken. Staff were whispering about the scientific heresy that had been committed within their grounds. Within weeks, Alex Reichel, director of CHAST and associate professor of applied mathematics, was called into the office of the dean of science.
“The dean said he was taking over the chairmanship of CHAST because he’d had complaints from people who thought I was putting out mystical ideas and giving a bad impression outside the university,” recalls Reichel. “When it came time for my re-election as director of CHAST, I wasn’t permitted to address the committee, they didn’t call for nominations and the dean himself appointed a new director.”
The dean, associate professor Bob Hewitt, says Reichel was removed because “he was concentrating on one narrow aspect of what CHAST was supposed to do. The perception of the holistic approach in the scientific community is very negative and in conflict with the basis of science.”
Still, the spirit survived. Dr Jeremy Evans, a lecturer in human sciences at the Australian National University, recalls, “I describe myself as coming out of the academic closet at that conference. I came out and said I am a holist. It was a dynamic conference. Everyone there seemed to be straining towards radical new ways of thinking. For three days there was an incredible discourse, a feeling of community, a sense of confronting terra incognita.”
Back in Canberra, Evans proposed two new courses to continue the exploration. (After he removed Sheldrake’s name and the word “holism” from the description, one course was accepted.)
Barbara Lepani, a director of the technology and human resources program based at Wollongong University, says, “It was nice to find other people who were going down the same track that I was on. When you find these patterns happening simultaneously in different areas, you can be sure something is happening.”
What is happening? Well, when pushed to answer why scientists around the world are arriving at a new paradigm at the same time from different directions, Lepani says something that is bound to rile even the wildest of feral scientists: “I personally believe in Sheldrake’s theory. In this case, I believe people are communicating through the field of knowing.”
Deirdre Macken is a senior writer for Good Weekend. Her last story was on the Sydney Futures Exchange.