Polysics - 'Black Out Fall Out'

Of science and its predictions

From: Promises, promises

Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas Malthus's eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and ecologist Paul Ehrlich's prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions—namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications. But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to materialize, unfulfilled predictions—of which we're seeing more and more—can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the reputation of science itself.

In 1995, for example, an expert panel on gene therapy convened by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's then-director Harold Varmus2 concluded: “Expectations of current gene therapy protocols have been oversold. Overzealous representation of clinical gene therapy has obscured the exploratory nature of the initial studies, colored the manner in which findings are portrayed to the scientific press and public, and led to the widely held, but mistaken, perception that clinical gene therapy is already highly successful. Such misrepresentation threatens confidence in the field and will inevitably lead to disappointment in both medical and lay communities.”

Scientists have been making predictions for as long as there have been scientists. Indeed, without speculating about the future, it would be impossible to make decisions about how best to proceed. But there is reason to believe that promises are becoming more central to the scientific process.

Sir Ian Wilmut, leader of the Roslin Institute team that cloned Dolly the sheep, says that a “soundbite” media culture that demands uncomplicated, definitive, and sensational statements plays a significant role. “It's [the media] who put the most pressure on scientists to make predictions,” he says. And in a radio or TV interview that allows perhaps only 10 or 20 seconds for an answer, “it's very easy then to inadvertently mislead.”

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'The difficulty of drawing lessons from an ancient war'

From: The School of Athens

... Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient history, has himself taken part in these arguments for almost a half-century. His own four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is a classic of modern scholarship. Now, with "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History," Mr. Kagan has produced what reads like the last word on the man, a nuanced and subtle account of a subject that has so often been treated in a spirit of high partisanship.

Mr. Kagan stresses that Thucydides, an Athenian naval commander who was exiled in 424 B.C. for losing an important battle in Thrace, was more than just a participant in the conflict that he described. He was also a player in the domestic politics of the war, the "spin" as well as the strategy. Thus "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History" is a book about a long-ago historian's argument with his contemporaries—the tension between facts and what one would like to be facts. "In the important cases examined here," Mr. Kagan writes, "the contemporary view was closer to the truth than [Thucydides'] own."

Of what can we be certain? Athens lost the war; Sparta won it. A turning point was Athens's ill-advised invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C. during a lull in the conflict with Sparta. The result was a catastrophic destruction of the vaunted Athenian navy and ultimately a fatal weakening of Athenian power. This, too, we know: When the Spartans finally won victory in 404 B.C., they were aided by a late alliance with Persia, the traditional enemy of all Greece. Beyond that outline, the certainties are scarce.

The origin of the war? Without doubt, tensions were rising in the mid-fifth century B.C. between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesian League, with Sparta as its leader. But was Pericles, the aristocratic leader of the Athenian democracy, a key cause of hostilities? Many of his contemporaries thought so, Mr. Kagan says. They blamed Pericles for his influential support of two actions against Spartan allies—restricting the trade of one, aiding the enemy of another—that helped to provoke war.

Thucydides strongly disagreed with Pericles' critics, insisting in his "History of the Peloponnesian War" that the conflict was caused by later demagogues and deeper underlying forces. Thucydides' interpretation would color most later scholarship. Yet Mr. Kagan notes that Thucydides' views were hardly the result of dispassionate analysis and were more likely a reaction to his family's anti-democratic past—he was simply supporting Pericles with a convert's zeal. ...

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Nation: You could die here

In Islamabad 30 years ago today...

From: TIME, Dec 3, 1979

It started as if it were nothing. Just two red buses; maybe 150 people. They got out and started milling around the big iron gates. They chanted anti-Carter slogans, threw a few rocks over the red brick wall, got back in the buses and drove away. End of demo. I was headed for the cafeteria, and Embassy Political Officer Herb Hagerty called out, "Save me a seat, I'll be right there." He never made it. It was a few minutes later, about 1p.m., that the buses returned, this time six of them. They were crammed with people, both inside and clinging to the roof. And now all hell broke loose.

The Marines slammed shut the gates as some of the mob began setting cars in the parking lot afire. Others bashed at the brick wall, using a heavy pole. There was constant yelling outside. Embassy staffers began locking their files. Dave Fields, the administrative counselor, watched the rioters smashing at the walls. "If the wall goes, we're in for it," he said. Moments later it did. "Everybody upstairs," Fields shouted.

We climbed a curved staircase to the embassy's third-floor vault, a specially designed, windowless steel-walled room, about 20 ft. by 30 ft. It contained communications equipment, coding devices, and an enormous safe. It had its own back-up power generator and battery-powered radios. "They're shooting," someone shouted. "They shot a Marine." "Where was he?" "On the roof." "Is he O.K.?" "I don't know."

Cpl. Steve Crowley, 19, a Long Islander who served in Pakistan about three months, had been assigned to roof duty, and a rioter had shot him in the side of the head. They got him down and brought him to an anteroom of the vault. A nurse hovered over him, fitting an oxygen mask. He lay in a pool of blood. I hadn't been scared at first, but now I was as I stood there looking at this young dying Marine.

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'resist and multiply'