Simply put, this “style” emphasizes conceptually simple and easy-to-do experiments. As a student I read voraciously, not only about modern biology but also about the history of science. I remember reading about Michael Faraday, the lower-class, self-educated man who discovered the principle of electromagnetism. In the early 1800s he placed a bar magnet behind a sheet of paper and threw iron filings on the sheet. The filings instantly aligned themselves into arcing lines. He had rendered the magnetic field visible! This was about as direct a demonstration as possible that such fields are real and not just mathematical abstractions. Next Faraday moved a bar magnet to and fro through a coil of copper wire, and lo and behold, an electric current started running through the coil. He had demonstrated a link between two entirely separate areas of physics: magnetism and electricity. This paved the way not only for practical applications—such as hydroelectric power, electric motors, and electromagnets—but also for the deep theoretical insights of James Clerk Maxwell. With nothing more than bar magnets, paper, and copper wire, Faraday had ushered in a new era in physics.
I remember being struck by the simplicity and elegance of these experiments. Any schoolboy or -girl can repeat them. It was not unlike Galileo dropping his rocks, or Newton using two prisms to explore the nature of light. For better or worse, stories like these made me a technophobe early in life. I still find it hard to use an iPhone, but my technophobia has served me well in other respects. Some colleagues have warned me that this phobia might have been okay in the nineteenth century when biology and physics were in their infancy, but not in this era of “big science,” in which major advances can only be made by large teams employing high-tech machines. I disagree. And even if it is partly true, “small science” is much more fun and can often turn up big discoveries. It still tickles me that my early experiments with phantom limbs (see Chapter 1) required nothing more than Q-tips, glasses of warm and cold water, and ordinary mirrors. Hippocrates, Sushruta, my ancestral sage Bharadwaja, or any other physicians between ancient times and the present could have performed these same basic experiments. Yet no one did.
Or consider Barry Marshall’s research showing that ulcers are caused by bacteria—not acid or stress, as every doctor “knew.” In a heroic experiment to convince skeptics of his theory, he actually swallowed a culture of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and showed that his stomach lining became studded with painful ulcers, which he promptly cured by consuming antibiotics. He and others later went on to show that many other disorders, including stomach cancer and even heart attacks, might be triggered by microorganisms. In just a few weeks, using materials and methods that had been available for decades, Dr. Marshall had ushered in a whole new era of medicine. Ten years later he won a Nobel Prize.
My preference for low-tech methods has both strengths and drawbacks, of course. I enjoy it—partly because I’m lazy—but it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And this is a good thing. Science needs a variety of styles and approaches. Most individual researchers need to specialize, but the scientific enterprise as a whole is made more robust when scientists march to different drumbeats. Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality. A diverse dramatis personae is a powerful tonic against these ailments. Science benefits from its inclusion of the abstraction-addled, absent-minded professors, the control-freak obsessives, the cantankerous bean-counting statistics junkies, the congenitally contrarian devil’s advocates, the hard-nosed data-oriented literalists, and the starry-eyed romantics who embark on high-risk, high-payoff ventures, stumbling frequently along the way. If every scientist were like me, there would be no one to clear the brush or demand periodic reality checks. But if every scientist were a brush-clearing, never-stray-beyond-established-fact type, science would advance at a snail’s pace and would have a hard time unpainting itself out of corners. Getting trapped in narrow cul-de-sac specializations and “clubs” whose membership is open only to those who congratulate and fund each other is an occupational hazard in modern science.
When I say I prefer Q-tips and mirrors to brain scanners and gene sequencers, I don’t mean to give you the impression that I eschew technology entirely. (Just think of doing biology without a microscope!) I may be a technophobe, but I’m no Luddite. My point is that science should be question driven, not methodology driven. When your department has spent millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art liquid-helium-cooled brain-imaging machine, you come under pressure to use it all the time. As the old saying goes, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” But I have nothing against high-tech brain scanners (nor against hammers). Indeed, there is so much brain imaging going on these days that some significant discoveries are bound to be made, if only by accident. One could justifiably argue that the modern toolbox of state-of-the-art gizmos has a vital and indispensable place in research. And indeed, my low-tech-leaning colleagues and I often do take advantage of brain imaging, but only to test specific hypotheses. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we are always grateful to have the high technology available—if we feel the need.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALTHOUGH IT IS LARGELY A PERSONAL ODYSSEY, THIS BOOK RELIES heavily on the work of many of my colleagues who have revolutionized the field in ways we could not have even imagined even just a few years ago. I cannot overstate the extent to which I have benefited from reading their books. I will mention just a few of them here: Joe LeDoux, Oliver Sacks, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Dan Dennett, Pat Churchland, Gerry Edelman, Eric Kandel, Nick Humphrey, Tony Damasio, Marvin Minsky, Stanislas Dehaene. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of these giants. Some of these books resulted from the foresight of two enlightened agents—John Brockman and Katinka Matson—who have created a new scientific literacy in America and the world beyond. They have successfully reignited the magic and awe of science in the age of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, sound-bite news, and reality TV—an age when the hard-won values of the Enlightenment are sadly in decline.
Angela von der Lippe, my editor, suggested major reorganization of chapters and provided valuable feedback throughout every stage of revision. Her suggestions improved the clarity of presentation enormously.
Special thanks to four people who have had a direct influence on my scientific career: Richard Gregory, Francis Crick, John D. Pettigrew, and Oliver Sacks.
I would also like to thank the many people who either goaded me on to pursue medicine and science as a career or influenced my thinking over the years. As I intimated earlier, I would not be where I am were it not for my mother and father. When my father was convincing me to go into medicine, I received similar advice from Drs. Rama Mani and M. K. Mani. I have never once regretted letting them talk me into it. As I often tell my students, medicine gives you a certain breadth of vision while at the same time imparting an intensely pragmatic attitude. If your theory is right, your patient gets better. If your theory is wrong—no matter how elegant or convincing it may be—she gets worse or dies. There is no better test of whether you are on the right track or not. And this no-nonsense attitude then spills over into your research as well.