Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

Another library book, but I picked this one because Amazon and iTunes (the audio book section) were pushing this book. And at first, I wasn't interested in a novel about research ethics and academic integrity issues in a lab. Didn't seem like it would make a compelling plot.

And yet it did. I was up till 3:30 this morning reading this book, and then I finished it this evening (which may have also been possible because the television wasn't working, but anyway...). Turns out, having just finished my degree, and working in a lab environment, and to a lesser degree, having dated a co-worker, it was incredibly interesting. A girl is hurt, and lashes out at what turns out to be an easy target. What's interesting is all the fallout in the supporting cast. And the academic politics. And ultimately, the intersection of science and politics (which is, after all, what I just finished studying, in a broad sense). Though my situation was far, far different than hers, having been in an academic environment, and knowing people in these sorts of positions made me sympathetic. And apparently, unable to put this book down. I'm going to recommend it to C., if and when we talk about books again, because I think he could (should?) find it interesting, as a person who will be pursuing research and perhaps a post-doc someday. The book is a little preachy at points, unfortunately tipping it's hand in judging what the characters are about to do, but I really liked it. And would recommend it (more generally) as an interesting commentary about the roles of science, ethics and personality in academia and research. It's more of a page-turner than a book that has literary elegance, but it does get points for turning a dry subject into a quick read.

"Deliciously self-deprecating, he dismissed his own results as minor, or even accidental. "It's random luck," he's day whenever he published an article or research note, and this along with myriad other sayings of Feng's, had become a catch-phrase in the lab. "Fungi," the other postdocs called them. To Marion's secret amusement, the researches collected Fungi in their lab books. For the past six months or so the postdocs had been compiling a lexicon that included such classic definitions as:

Sucessful grant proposal (idiom): 'major disaster, long-term'
Analyze (verb): 'to flounder'
Hypothesis (noun): 'highly flawed thinking'
Conference (noun): 'cancer junket'
Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): 'sick tax'
Breakthrough (noun): 'artifact'"

"Jacob thought carefully before he spoke. He looked at Robin as she sat before him in her short-sleeved summer shirt; he considered her bare arms, her fine open face, the humility and baffled sdness in her confession. He thought abou the place the time, and Robin's state of mind. Quite deliberately, Jacob considered what his words might mean to her - hesitated a moment - then shot his arrow anyway. He said, 'The results seem almost too good to be true'."