Offices in Salomon's House
Dr. N. Burr Furlong (burr@artifex.org)
Perhaps the most common complaint which currently echoes through the halls of research institutes and universities concerns the inordinate time that researchers must spend in writing multiple grant proposals and reports. Why, asks the agonized researcher, should I, who have invested five years in graduate study and three in post-doctoral training, have to spend so much of my time behind a desk writing and rewriting research proposals, budgets, bibliographies and justifications? After all, the lament continues, was I not trained in laboratory research and wasn't working in the lab the reason I got into this business in the first place? This argument has the ring of validity and, indeed, if modern science had held to the advice of one of its founders, we might not find ourselves in this situation.One of the first models for a research institution was created by Francis Bacon in "New Atlantis". There, he describes Salomon's House dedicated to the "knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." At the time this was written, the pursuit of "natural philosophy", alias science, was still several centuries away from becoming a vocation on its own merits rather than the incidental interest of those who were supported by other employments. Thus it is all the more remarkable that a model for an association devoted to scientific exploration should have been so imaginatively suggested at this time. Sir Francis took great care to delineate the "employments and offices" of the fellows of Salomon's House. There may well be contemporary lessons to be learned from the divisions of labor represented in his analysis.
The scientific activities of Bacon's model institute were pursued by nine groups of functionaries who, if translated into their modern counterparts, could be characterized as collectors, abstractors, methodologists, experimentalists, compilers, reviewers, planners, practitioners and theorizers. Some notion of Bacon's assessment of the relative labor involved in these functions may be inferred from the fact that there were 12 collectors and 3 of each of the others, 36 in all. Perhaps of greatest interest, in comparison to present research practice, are the implicit assumptions that these practitioners work independently but cooperatively and (even more remarkably) that their contributions are valued equally.
Corresponding to these functions, the ideal flow of scientific investigation, in Bacon's vision, involves the following responsibilities: a continuous input of information from all sources (collectors), followed by its careful collation (abstractors) and the formulation of approaches (methodologists) after which independent tests would be performed (experimentalists). Keep in mind that each of these activities is the responsibility of separate groups of experts. Then, still other independent teams of experts would be employed (each separately) in organizing reports of the experimental results (compilers), analyzing them for applications (reviewers), devising the next series of tests (planners), performing pilot studies (practioners) and drawing general conclusions from them (theorizers).
It may be rather difficult for those of us engaged in modern scientific research to relate Bacon's vision to our experience. Indeed, our first impression may be that Bacon is suggesting an impossibly inefficient bureaucracy, a frightening specter of research by committee. But without too much stretching of definitions, I might propose a few correspondences. For instance let me suggest that in current practice we could easily identify the independent experimenters; they are the lamenters of our first paragraph. However, their laments provide the clue that these worthies are also either directing or performing at least the functions of collectors, methodologists, compilers and planners.
What about the collectors? I think that it would be fair to say that most researchers rely mostly on their own, or their student's, analysis of published papers as a primary source of information for planning and interpreting experiments. Often of great importance also are direct conversations between investigators. This is not to belittle the role played by abstracting and citation services, which indeed more closely correspond to the collectors identified by Bacon. However, in the day to day pursuit of immediate research objectives, it is my impression that these services are not often as crucial as the flow of ideas which emerge from journal clubs or seminars.
Then, as for methodologists, compilers and planners, only rarely in academic or governmental research laboratories are these the sole functions performed by independent principle investigators. Bacon's compilers correspond to the actual writers of research reports and perhaps the oddest aspect of his vision to a modern scientist is that he should have assumed the report of a research project would not be written by the individuals doing the research.
Who is responsible for the other divisions of labor represented in Bacon's analysis? Abstraction and review are regarded as activities suitable for those whose research has come to a pause, but of secondary importance when the experimentalist is hot on the trail of new findings. Practicioners, those who perform the pilot experiments designed by the planners, are quite often students or technicians. And the independent theorizers who are to develop general axioms and aphorisms from the data obtained are almost non-existent outside of the physical sciences. In brief, it would appear as if all the labors of the entire scientific endeavor have devolved monotonically on the modern experimentalist. There should be great justification for complaint.
There are at least two conclusions we can make about the differences between present practice and Bacon's model. Perhaps Sir Francis was an impractical visionary when it came to the actual conduct of research and had unrealistic expectations of the division of labor. On the other hand, our modern research endeavor may have evolved a less than ideal modus operandum.
We should not be too hasty in assuming shortcomings in Bacon's intellectual capabilities. We might even find some support for his model in recognizing that some very effective research teams and support personnel in many industrial laboratories have been organized more along the lines described by Bacon. Is it possible we may have forgotten that many distinct types of scholarly activity contribute to the advance of scientific knowledge? Undue emphasis on any one or few of these may result in inefficient or poor science and, in the worst cases, may create pressures that lead to dishonest science.
Let me suggest the almost heretical possibility that the much heralded and hotly defended system of research support whereby individual investigators are awarded funding for the pursuit of specific projects operates to overvalue the contribution of the laboratory experimenter. Grant funds are seldom, if ever, given to those who state their primary research will be the collection and collation of information produced by others or the production of theories for others to test or the review of the literature on some subject or the analysis and editing of experimental data. It is true that most of these activities are done, but the doer more often than not, is also the experimentalist.
Perhaps one could argue that only an individual actively engaged in the detailed pursuit of a given scientific problem is qualified to accomplish these other adjuncts of investigation. In this sort of rebuttal it is tempting to defend the status quo, but again let me point out that apparently there are organizations in which a division of effort among specialists has produced creative synergy. Also in many research groups known for their productivity, we all recognize that funds awarded to an individual experimenter for the support a specific project are utilized for more general service functions not dissimilar to the categories identified by Sir Francis.
But perhaps we are missing the larger lesson here, the exclusive concentration of funding and research administration as the responsibility of the laboratory experimentalist may be discouraging the development of other scholarly talents, perhaps those very talents so sorely needed for recognizing the grains of wheat published amidst the enormous mounds of descriptive chaff or those deductive talents capable of discerning patterns of predictive significance in a chaos of data. I think Sir Francis had an insight we may have neglected to our present discomfort and, perhaps, our eventual peril.
{This essay was published in the June ?, 1985 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education in their Perspectives section (which appeares prominently on their back page). Other than one or two comments from Medical Center colleagues who happened to read the article and one letter from ? Garfinkle, the editor and founder of the Current Content series, I had no indication that the ideas were either read or understood by any one else actively engaged in the research rat race.}