Root Privileges

Science

There’s a scientistic eclipse

There is a solar eclipse today and news websites are as usual participating in amplifying nonsense. It’s prima facie not nonsense in and of itself but because it’s not qualified as astrological material. That is, it’s an example of news sites not exercising good judgment.

Science doesn’t have a monopoly on sense-making, so calling it “nonsense” isn’t fair. Science also isn’t implicitly entitled to be the prime belief system. So while these assertions are non-scientific, they shouldn’t be qualified with respect to meaning but to the scientific truth-value.

But assuming science has a monopoly implicitly elevates science’s ability and efficacy to make sense, especially in a non-exclusionary way. People who wouldn’t eat during an eclipse aren’t necessarily wanting for scientific facts. Sometimes, it’s because of how scientific literacy is currently limited. Pseudoscience enslaves but so does science. So we should be mindful of the words we use to describe pseudoscience, and keep open the possibility that the social consequences of these two knowledge systems can, in quality, overlap. As I wrote in an older post:

There is a hegemony of science as well. Beyond the mythos of its own cosmology (to borrow Paul Feyerabend’s quirky turn of phrase in Against Method), there is also the matter of who controls knowledge production and utilisation. In Caliban and the Witch (1998), Sylvia Federici traces the role of the bourgeoisie in expelling beliefs in magic and witchcraft in preindustrial Europe only to prepare the worker’s body to accommodate the new rigours of labour under capitalism. She writes, “Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalisation of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action. ‘Magic kills industry,’ lamented Francis Bacon…”.

For example, hardcore, or by that same measure naïve, rationalists have been known to erect a pandal on the road and eat food during an eclipse, apparently in defiance of the beliefs of others. But that’s only defiance per se. Their actions say that they have underestimated the agility of the belief system and apparently ignored its punitive mechanics. Ultimately, it comes off as ignorant and is thus easily dismissed.

Why is science “the best”? It isn’t, and such scientism is harmful. What is “the best” is whatever empowers. The knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples predates science. Are they automatically disempowered? No. Other eclipse beliefs exist because of where social power and legitimacy lie. People believe it because others believe it. As Renny Thomas’s new book suggests, they may also believe it because we have erected a false binary between science and religion.

Zee News’s wording also presumes all “Indians” are “orthodox Hindus” and that their beliefs are indistinguishable from (unverified) Ayurvedic prescriptions – a form of the religion/culture superposition to which the regime has often taken recourse. (There is also a Hindiness to its language: “grahan” v. “grahanam”, for example.)

If astrology is pseudoscience, is science pseudo-astrology? The Indian right-wing is fixated on impressing the West, otherwise it may have noticed this. 😜 This said, astrology is bad and must be curtailed because it has a greater potential for harm. But we won’t fix anything by reflexively replacing it with another hard-to-independently-verify knowledge system. If one enslaves, the other must liberate. Otherwise, to quote from an older post:

But using science communication as a tool to dismantle myths, instead of tackling superstitious rituals that (to be lazily simplistic) suppress the acquisition of potentially liberating knowledge, is to create an opposition that precludes the peaceful coexistence of multiple knowledge systems. In this setting, science communication perpetuates the misguided view that science is the only useful way to acquire and organise our knowledge — which is both ahistorical and injudicious.

This post is also available as a Twitter thread.

Apr 30, 2022
The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science

The question of “Who found it first?” in science is deceptively straightforward. It is largely due to the rewards reserved by those who administer science – funding the ‘right’ people working in the ‘right’ areas at the ‘right’ time to ensure the field’s progress along paths deemed desirable by the state – that primacy in science has become valuable. Otherwise, and in an ideal world (in which rewards are distributed more equitably, such that the quality of research is rewarded a certain amount that is lower than the inordinate rewards that accrue to some privileged scientists today but greater than that which scholars working on ‘neglected’ topics/ideas receive, without regard for gender, race, ethnicity or caste), discovering something first wouldn’t matter to the enterprise of science, just as it doesn’t mean anything to the object of the discovery itself.

Primacy is a virtue imposed by the structures of modern science. There is today privilege in being cited as “Subramaniam 2021” or “Srinivasan 2022” in papers, so much so that there is reason to believe many scientific papers are published only so they may cite the work of others and keep expanding this “citation circus”. The more citations there are, the likelier the corresponding scientist is to receive a promotion, a grant, etc. at their institute.

Across history, the use of such citations has also served to obscure the work of ‘other’ scientists and to attribute a particular finding to a single individual or a group. This typically manifests in one of two forms: by flattening the evolution of a complex discovery by multiple groups of people working around the world, sometimes sharing information with each other, to a single paper authored by one of these groups; or by reinforcing the association of one or some names with particular ideas in the scientific literature, thus overlooking important contributions by less well-known scientists.

The former is a complex phenomenon that is often motivated by ‘prestigious’ awards, including the Nobel Prizes, limiting themselves to a small group of laureates at a time, as well as by the meagre availability of grants for advanced research. Scientists and, especially, the institutes at which they work engage as a result in vociferous media campaigns when an important discovery is at hand, to ensure that opportunities for profit that may arise out of the finding may rest with them alone. This said, it can also be the product of lazy citations, in which scientists cite their friends or peers they like or wish to impress, or collections of papers over the appropriate individual ones, instead of conducting a more exhaustive literature review to cite everyone involved everywhere.

The second variety of improper citations is of course one that has dogged India – and one with which anyone working with or alongside science in India must be familiar. It has also been most famously illustrated by instances of women scientists who were subsequently overlooked for Nobel Prizes that were awarded to the men who worked with them, often against them. (The Nobel Prizes are false gods and we must tear them down; but for their flaws, they remain good, if also absurdly selective, markers of notable scientific work: that is, no prize has thus far been awarded to work that didn’t deserve it.) The stories of Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind.

But also consider the Indian example of Meghnad Saha’s paper about selective radiation pressure (in the field of stellar astrophysics), which predated Irving Langmuir’s paper on the same topic by three years. Saha lost out on the laurels by not being able to afford having his paper published in a more popular journal and had to settle for one with “no circulation worth mentioning” (source). An equation in this theory is today known as the Saha-Langmuir equation, but even this wouldn’t be so without the conscious effort of some scholars to highlight Saha’s work and unravel the circumstances that forced him into the shadows.

I discovered recently that comparable, yet not similar, circumstances had befallen Bibhas De, when the journal Icarus rejected a paper he had submitted twice. The first time, his paper presented his calculations predicting that the planet Uranus had rings; the second time was five years later, shortly after astronomers had found that Uranus indeed had rings. Stephen Brush and Ariel Segal wrote in their 2015 book, “Although he did succeed in getting his paper published in another journal, he rarely gets any credit for this achievement.”

In both these examples, and many others like them, scientists’ attempts to formalise their successes by having their claims detailed in the literature were mediated by scientific journals – whose editors’ descisions had nothing to do with science (costs in the former case and who-knows-what in the latter).

At the same time, because of these two issues, flattening and reinforcing, attribution for primacy is paradoxically more relevant: if used right, it can help reverse these problems, these imprints of colonialism and imperialism in the scientific literature. ‘Right’ here means, to me at least, that everyone is credited or none at all, as an honest reflection of the fact that good science has never been vouchsafed to the Americans or the Europeans. But then this requires more problems to be solved, such as, say, replacing profit-based scientific publishing (and the consequent valorisation of sensational results) with a ‘global scientific record’ managed by the world’s governments through an international treaty.

Axiomatically, perhaps the biggest problem with primacy today is its entrenchment. I’m certain humanities and social science scholars have debated this thoroughly – the choice for the oppressed and the marginalised between beating their oppressors at their own game or transcending the game itself. Obviously the latter seems more englightened, but it is also more labour-intensive, labour that can’t be asked freely of them – our scientists and students who are already fighting to find or keep their places in the community of their peers. Then again, beating them at their own game may not be so easy either.

I was prompted to write this post, in fact, after I stumbled on four seemingly innocuous words in a Wikipedia article about stellarators. (I wrote about these nuclear-fusion devices yesterday in the context of a study about solving an overheating problem.) The article reads that when a solenoid – a coiled wire – is bent around to form a loop, the inner perimeter of the loop has a higher density of wire than the outer perimeter. Surely this is obvious, yet the Wikpedia article phrases it thus (emphasis added):

But, as Fermi pointed out, when the solenoid is bent into a ring, the electrical windings would be closer together on the inside than the outside.

Why does a common-sensical claim, which should strike anyone who can visualise or even see a solenoid made into a loop, be attributed to the celebrated Italian physicist Enrico Fermi? The rest of the paragraph to which this sentence belongs goes on to describe how this winding density affects nuclear fusion reactors; it is an arguably straightforward effect, far removed from the singularity and the sophistication of other claims whose origins continue to be mis- or dis-attributed. Wikipedia articles are also not scientific papers. But taken together, the attribution to Fermi contains the footprints of the fact that he, as part of the Knabenphysik of quantum mechanics, worked on many areas of physics, allowing him to attach his name to a variety of concepts at a time when studies on the same topics were only just catching on in other parts of the world – a body of work enabled, as is usual, by war, conquest and the quest for hegemony.

Maybe fighting over primacy is the tax we must pay today for allowing this to happen.

Mar 28, 2022
Climate change, like quantum physics, will strain language

One of the defining features of quantum mechanics is that it shows up human language, and thought supported by that language, to be insufficient and limited. Many of the most popular languages of the world, including Tamil, Hindi and English, are linear. Their script reads in a line from one end of the page to the other, and their spoken words compile meaning based on a linear sequence and order of words. It is possible to construe these meanings in turn only after word after another, through the passage of time. If time stops, so does language.

Such linearity is incompatible with the possibilities in quantum mechanics for simultaneity, in both space and time. Quantum superposition is not exactly a system in two states at once but in a linear combination of states, but without the specialised knowledge, language can only offer a slew of metaphors, each of which hews asymptotically closer to the actual thing but never captures it in its entirety. Quantum entanglement, similarly, causes one particle to affect another instantaneously, over hundreds of kilometres, defying both the universal information speed limit and the ability of human minds that remain constrained by that limit, as well as a human language that has no place for, and therefore can’t identify, simultaneity. All we have something after another, effect after cause, the first step and then the second, and never both at once.

Indeed, the notion of causality – that cause will always precede effect – is one of the load-bearing pillars of reality as we strive to understand it.

But while quantum mechanics is so kooky, it is also excusably so, considering it represents a paradigm shift of sorts from the truths of classical physics (it plays by different rules, that is). It is almost simply natural that our languages do not encompass the possibilities afforded by a phenomenon we didn’t encounter until the 20th century, and still don’t except through specialised apparatuses and controlled experimental conditions.

However, there is another system of things that plays largely by the rules of classical physics – our interactions with and formalisation of which paralleled the evolution of our languages – and yet increasingly defies the ability of our languages to describe it faithfully: climate change.

True, weather and climate patterns include aspects of chaos theory, which explains how minute differences in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. But chaos theory still only takes recourse to non-linear effects, which, while harder to conceive of than their linear counterparts, are easier than to grapple with non-locality and non-causality. Of course, climate change doesn’t violate any of these or other similarly foundational principles, yet it complicates interactions in the global weather system and intensifies the interactions between the elements and human culture, technology and biology – both to such a degree that they have consequences both different and new.

For example, to quote from an article The Wire Science published this morning:

Climate change will further exacerbate marine heatwave risks in the [Indian subcontinent] region, according to [Ming] Feng. This could suppress coastal upwelling – the process by which strong winds move surface water in the ocean, permitting water from below to surface – and reduce the amount of oxygen in the water. This in turn could have a “great impact” on fisheries.

A big part of climate change’s (extant as well as impending) devastation is in the form of surprise – that is, of the emergent phenomena that it makes possible. Expounded most famously by the brilliant physicist Philip W. Anderson, especially in his 1972 essay ‘More Is Different’, emergence is the idea that we cannot fully describe a large system only by studying its smallest components. Put another way, larger systems have emergent properties and behaviour that are more than the sum of the ways in which systems’ most fundamental parts interact. Studying climate change is important because the additional complexity it imbues to existing weather systems are ripe with emergent effects, each with new consequences and perhaps more effects of their own.

At the same time, the bulk of these effects, taken together, anticipate such a large volume of possibilities that even though they certainly won’t defy reality’s, and human languages’, assumption that causality is true, they will push it to extreme limits. Two events are still at liberty to happen at the same time, each with a distinct and preceding cause, but even as the ways we communicate wait for cause before composing effect, climate change will confront us with a tsunami of changes – each one reinforcing, screening or ignoring the other, rapidly branching out into a larger, denser forest of changes, until the cause is only relevant as an historical artefact in our grammar of the natural universe.

Mar 10, 2022
Must war have consequences for scientists?

The Journal of Molecular Structure has temporarily banned manuscript submissions from scientists working at state science institutes in Russia. The decision extends the consequences of war beyond the realm of politics, albeit to persons who have played no role in Putin’s invasion and might even have opposed it at great risk to themselves. Such reactions have been common in sports, for example, but much less so in science.

The SESAME synchrotron radiation facility in Jordan, operated by CERN and the Jordan atomic energy agency and with support from UNESCO, takes pride in promoting peace among its founding members (Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey). CERN in Europe, born in the aftermath of World War II, has a similar goal.

In fact, in the science-adjacent enterprise of spaceflight, the corresponding US and Russian agencies have cooperated against the shared backdrop of the International Space Station even when their respective heads of state have been at odds with each other on other issues. But as Pradeep Mohandas wrote recently, Roscosmos’s response to sanctions against Russia have disrupted space science to an unprecedented degree, including the ExoMars and the Venera D missions. Update, March 8, 2022, 7:14 pm: CERN also seems to have suspended Russia’s ‘observer’ status in the organisation and has said it will cooperate with international sanctions against the country.

Such virtues are in line with contemporary science’s aspiration to be ‘apolitical’, irrespective of whether that is humanitarian, and ‘objective’ in all respects. This is of course misguided, yet the aspiration itself persists and is often considered desirable. In this context, the decision of the editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure, Rui Fausto, to impose sanctions on scientists working at institutions funded by the Russian government for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes across as enlightened (even though Fausto himself calls his decision “apolitical”). But it is not.

Science in the 21st century is of course a reason of state. In various conflicts around the world, both communities and nation-states have frequently but not explicitly appropriated the fruits of civilian enterprise, especially science, to fuel and/or sustain conflicts. Nation-states have done this by vouchsafing the outcomes of scientific innovation to certain sections of the population to directly deploying such innovation on battlefields. Certain communities, such as the casteist Brahmins of Silicon Valley, misogynistic academics in big universities and even those united by their latent queerphobia, have used the structural privileges that come with participating in the scientific, or the adjacent technological, enterprise to perpetrate violence against members of “lower” castes, female students and genderqueer persons, for reasons that have nothing to do with the latter’s academic credentials.

However, the decision of the Journal of Molecular Structure is undermined by two problems with Fausto’s reasoning. First, the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be the most prominent in the world right now but it isn’t the only one. Others include the conflict in the Kashmir Valley, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the Yemeni civil war and the oppression of Uyghur and Rohingya Muslims in South and Southeast Asia. Why haven’t Fausto et al. banned submissions from scientists working at state-sponsored institutes in India, Israel, Saudi Arabia and China? The journal’s editorial board doesn’t include any scientists affiliated with institutes in Russia or Ukraine – which suggests both that there was no nationalistic stake to ban scientists in Russia alone and that there could have been a nationalistic stake that kept the board from extending the ban to other hegemons around the world. Either way, this glaring oversight reduces the journal’s decision to grandstanding.

The second reason, and also really why Fausto’s decision shouldn’t be extended to scientists labouring in other aggressor nations, is that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is an autocrat – as are the political leaders of the countries listed above (with the exception of Israel). As I wrote recently in an (unpublished) essay:

… we have all come across many stories in the last two years in which reporters quoted unnamed healthcare workers and government officials to uncover important details of the Government of India’s response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. Without presuming to know the nature of relationships between these ‘sources’ and the respective reporters, we can say they all likely share a conflict of ethics: they are on the frontline and they are needed there, but if they speak up, they may lose their ability to stay there.

Indeed, India’s Narendra Modi government itself has refused to listen to experts or expertise, and has in fact often preempted or sought to punish scientists whom it perceives to be capable of contradicting the government’s narratives. Modi’s BJP enjoys an absolute majority in Parliament, allowing it a free hand in lawmaking, and as an authoritarian state it has also progressively weakened the country’s democratic institutions. In all, the party has absolute power in the country, which it often uses to roll over the rights of minorities and health and ecological safeguards based on science as much as to enable industrial development and public administration on its own terms. In this milieu, speaking up and out is important, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about how much we can expect our comments to achieve.

Similarly, in Putin’s Russia, more than 4,700 scientists and science journalists recently signed an open letter protesting the invasion of Ukraine, potentially opening themselves up to persecution (the Russian government has already arrested more than 5,000 protestors). But how much of a damn does Putin give for scientists studying molecular structure in the country’s state-funded research facilities? In an ideal scenario, pinching the careers of certain people only makes sense if the country’s leader can be expected to heed their words. Otherwise, sanctions such as that being imposed by the Journal of Molecular Chemistry will have no effect except on the scientists’ work – scientists who are now caught between a despot and an inconsiderate journal.

Ultimately, Fausto’s decision would seem to be apolitical, but in a bad way. Would that it had been political, it would also have been good.Modern science surely has a difficult place in society. But in autocratic setups, there arises a pronounced difference between a science practised by the élite and the powerful, in proximity to the state and with privileged access to political power, and which would deserve sanctions such as those extended by the Journal of Molecular Structure. Then there is the science more removed from that power, still potentially being a reason of state but at the same time less “open to co-optation by the powerful and the wealthy” (source).

Mar 5, 2022
‘Aatmanirbharta through science’

The Week magazine distinguished itself last year by picking Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balram Bhargava as its ‘person of the year’ for 2021. And now, ahead of National Science Day tomorrow, The Week has conducted an “exclusive” interview with science minister Jitendra Singh. ~~Long~~ Small story short, it’s rubbish.

I discovered the term ‘Gish gallop’ in a 2013 blog post by David Gorsky, in which he wrote about the danger of acquiescing to cranks’ request for experts to debate them on a public stage. While such invitations may appear to legitimate experts to be an opportunity to settle the matter once and for all, it never works that way: the stage and the debate become platforms on which the cranks can spew their bullshit, in the name of having the right in the limited context of the event to do so, and use the inevitably imperfect rebuttal – limited by time and other resources – as a way to legitimise some or all of their claims. (Also read in this context: ‘No, I Will Not Debate You’.)

One particular tactic to which cranks resort in these circumstances is, Gorsky wrote, “to Gish gallop”: to flood their rhetoric with new terms, claims, arguments, etc. with little regard for their relevance or accuracy, in an effort to inundate their opponents with too many points on which to push back.

In their ‘interview’, with the help of kowtowing questions and zero push-back, The Week has allowed Jitendra Singh to Gish gallop. In this case, however, instead of Singh drawing credibility from his ‘opponent’ being an expert who couldn’t effectively refute his contentions, he derives his upper-hand from his interlocutor being a well-known, once-reputed magazine, and secretly from its (possibly enforced) supinity.

The penultimate question is the best, to me: “Yet, India’s good work gets shadowed by pseudoscience utterances. Somehow, your government has not been able to quieten the mumbo jumbo.” Dear interviewer, the government itself is the origin of a lot of the mumbo jumbo. Any question that isn’t founded on that truth will always ignore the problem, and will not elicit a solution.

Overall, the interview is a press release worded in the form of a Q&A, with a healthy chance that the opportunity to publish it was dangled in front of The Week in exchange for soft questions. Yet its headline may be accurate in a way the magazine didn’t intend: this government is going to achieve its mythical goal of perfect ‘Aatmanirbharta’ only by boring a hole through science, and reason and common sense.

Happy national science day!

Featured image: Jitendra Singh, May 2014. Photo edited (see original here). Credit: Press Information Bureau/GoI, GODL – India.

Feb 27, 2022
NSD II

That the Modi government has been able to coopt National Science Day as well as it has speaks only to the occasion’s moral vacuity. India’s National Science Day is the day on which physicist C.V. Raman discovered the optical effect named for him, and the government zeroed in on this discovery, over numerous others, because it won Raman a Nobel Prize. (If another scientist wins another science Nobel Prize in future, will the day be changed?) The Day’s foundation in effect has nothing to say about the spiritual, moral and aspirational scaffolding of science’s practice in the country. It doesn’t encourage, for example, the ethical practice of science, or that science must as a duty inform politics and governance, or that the scientific publics must in all contexts strive to uphold the spirit of critical thinking.

National Science Day has no prescriptions attached to it; it simply commemorates one man’s one achievement at one time. (The theme ascribed to each science day is equally purposeless.) So its coattails can be easily hitched to any wagon, even to pseudoscience – as the BJP in power at the Centre has done, by celebrating National Science Week and having its ministers talk in the press about National Science Day while calling the inclusion of Ayurveda and homeopathy within the national healthcare system “integrated science” and talking about misinformation and disinformation as if everyone else but itself produces them. “Integrated Approach in S&T for Sustainable Future” is, incidentally, the theme for National Science Day 2022.

Much as I dislike the concept, I do believe we need a National Science Day – but not the one that exists. The latter is a container, a receptacle that is only too happy to hold anything poured inside, whether an elixir or sewage. Instead, we need a National Science Day to remember what we have lost as a result of the occasion’s current character. For one, we have lost an opportunity for an occasion that reaffirms a science-related thing to which we can all aspire.

For example, we can renew a vow every year on this day to keep considerations of caste, class and creed out of our universities and research facilities. (So that when one scientist does, others understand in a simple way why they have to stand up and speak up.) We can promise to keep science from contributing to any form of violence – physical, mental, economic, structural. (So that when the government develops “chilli grenades”, both scientists and the non-scientists at large have a simple justification for resistance.) We can attach scientific success to open knowledge and open access so that the fruits of scientists’ labour are available for everyone to enjoy. (So an administrator doesn’t withhold a scientist’s promotion because the latter didn’t publish peer-reviewed papers that would end up behind a paywall.) And so forth. There are many virtues to be had through the honest practice of science, and a national festival – such as it is – is a phenomenal opportunity to formalise them for science’s benefit.

We also need a National Science Day that skips over the obsession with the scientific temper, or at least combines scientific temper with social responsibility. But one goose step at a time.

Feb 27, 2022
Marie Curie: An icon or ‘in the way’?

Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn’t exist? In 2017, Science published an article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Marie Curie. I got to it today because of this tweet:

Marie Sklodowska Curie was the first woman to receive a #NobelPrize and first person to receive the honor twice. In 2017, @SciMagBooks explored the dynamics that established Curie as "the most iconic of all female scientists." https://t.co/dYA8ifRDqg
— Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) February 16, 2022

One of the most well-known woman physicists and scientists – if not the most well-known – of the post-industrial era is Marie Curie. This is due in large part to the fact that she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (physics, 1903), the first woman to win any Nobel Prize, the first person as well as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize twice (chemistry, 1911) and in two different fields.

As awesome as this roster of accomplishments sounds, they were all manufactured. The Nobel Prizes create prestige by being selective: they pick awardees for a prize after rejecting hundreds of equally eligible candidates for arbitrary reasons. One important reason is that potential laureates have to be nominated and are then considered by a committee of ‘luminaries’ behind closed doors. Both the nomination and the deliberation have historically been dominated by men, so as such few women were nominated in the first place and even fewer made it to the shortlist, if at all.

Ultimately, using the Nobel Prizes to describe “iconic” scientists forces us to inherit the Nobel Prizes’ prejudices. As a people, do we want to assemble a list of iconic scientists – members of society that were shaped by our collective morals and aspirations, and worked among us, often struggling through shared problems – that is assailed by the flaws that beset the Nobel Prizes? I assume the answer is ‘no’.

While Marie Curie may deserve her laurels for all the notable work that she did, we must remember that notability is like a fraction: the numerator is that individual’s contribution and the denominator is the background of achievements against which we examine it. The Nobel Prizes have horribly skewed the denominator in favour of men and of pseudo-signifiers of notability, like publishing in certain journals at certain times from certain countries.

Marie was the first woman to record a clutch of achievements vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes, and all of them were the prize-giving committee’s failures – not Marie’s success. We don’t know how many other women everyone from the first nominators to the final committee overlooked. More importantly, we don’t know how many more women, and scientists of other genders, we the people ourselves overlooked, because we were too busy paying attention to the Nobel Prizes.

I can’t claim to speak for Marie Curie but I know it’s not fair to call her the “most iconic” on the back of a false distinction. As Hemmungs Wirtén wrote in her article:

Curie’s track record is well known. So far, the only woman twice awarded the Nobel Prize – her 1903 and 1911 distinctions in physics and chemistry, respectively – ensure her a permanent seat on the Mount Olympus of science. … The material that transformed Curie from person to persona comes to us largely via Eve Curie’s famous hagiography of her mother, Madame Curie. …
Recent years have seen this idealized version of Curie challenged by less-celebratory interpretations. In Julie Des Jardin’s The Madame Curie Complex, Curie is described as “a superhuman anomaly,” one who causes female scientists frustration by establishing unrealistic expectations of scientific accomplishment, rather than inspiring them to excel. … For some, Curie is simply in the way. “Stop talking about Marie Curie,” suggested Rachel Swaby in a piece in Wired in 2015. She casts too big a shadow, is too well known, and has become the one and only female scientist in the public imagination, Swaby argues. There is some merit to this argument.

Featured image: An edited photo of Marie Curie, c. 1920. Credit: Public domain.

Feb 16, 2022
PTI, celebrating scientists, and class/caste

SpaceX announced a day or two ago that the crew of its upcoming Polaris Dawn mission will include a space operations engineer at the company named Anna Menon. As if on cue, PTI published a report on February 15 under the headline: “SpaceX engineer Anna Menon to be among crew of new space mission”. I’ve been a science journalist for almost a decade now and I’ve always seen PTI publish reports pegged on the fact that a scientist in the news for some reason has an Indian last name.

In my view, it’s always tricky to celebrate scientists for whatever they’ve done by starting from their nationality. Consider the case of Har Gobind Khorana, whose birth centenary we marked recently. Khorana was born in Multan in pre-independence India in 1922, and studied up to his master’s degree in the country until 1945. Around 1950, he returned to India for a brief period in search of a job. He didn’t succeed, but fortunately received a scholarship to return to the UK, where he had completed his PhD. After that Khorana was never based in India, and continued his work in the UK, Canada and the US.

He won a Nobel Prize in 1968, and India conferred him with the Padma Vibhushan in 1969, and India’s Department of Biotechnology floated a scholarship in his name in 2007 (together with the University of Wisconsin and the India-US S&T Forum). I’m glad to celebrate Khorana for his scientific work, or his reputation as a teacher, but how do I celebrate Khorana because he was born in India? Where is the celebration-worthy thing in that?

To compare, it’s easy for me to celebrate Satyendra Nath Bose for his science as well as his nationality because Bose studied and worked in India throughout his life (including at the University of Dhaka in the early 1920s), so his work is a reflection of his education in India and his struggles to succeed, such as they were, in India. An even better example here would be that of Meghnad Saha, who struggled professionally and financially to make his mark on stellar astrophysics. But Khorana completed a part of his studies in India and a part abroad and worked entirely abroad. When I celebrate his work because he was Indian, I’m participating in an exercise that has no meaning – or does in the limited, pernicious sense of one’s privileges.

The same goes for Anna Menon, and her partner Anil Menon, a flight surgeon whom NASA selected to be a part of its astronaut crew earlier this year. According to Anil’s Wikipedia page, he was in India for a year in 2000; other than that, he studied and worked in the US from start to today. I couldn’t find much about Anna’s background online, except that her last name before she got married to Anil in 2016 was Wilhelm, that she studied her fourth grade and completed her bachelor’s and master’s studies in the US, and that there is nothing other than her partner’s part Indian heritage (the other part is Ukrainian) to suggest she has a significant India connection.

So celebrating Anna Menon by sticking her name in a headline makes little sense. It’s not like PTI has been reporting on her work over time for it to single her out in the headline now. The agency should just have said “SpaceX announces astronaut crew for pioneering Polaris Dawn mission” or “With SpaceX draft, Anna Menon could beat her partner Anil to space”. There’s so much worth celebrating here, but gravitating towards the ‘Menon’ will lead you astray.

This in turn gives rise to a question about one’s means, and in turn one’s class/caste (historically as well as today, both the chance to leave the country to study, work and live abroad and the chance to conduct good work and have it noticed has typically accrued and accrues to upper-caste, upper-class peoples – Saha’s example again comes to mind; such chances have also been stacked against people of genders other than cis-male).

When we talk about a scientist who did good work in India, we automatically talk about the outcomes of privileges that they enjoy. Similarly, when we talk of a scientist doing good work in a different country, we also talk about implicit caste/class advantage in India, the country of origin, that allowed them to depart and advantages they subsequently came into at their destination.

But when we place people who are doing something noteworthy in the spotlight for no reason other than because they have Indian last names, we are celebrating nothing except this lopsided availability of paths to success (broadly defined) – without critiquing the implied barriers to finding similar success within India itself.

We need to think more critically about who we are celebrating and why: if there is no greater reason than that they have had a parent or a family rooted in India, the story must be dropped. If there is a greater reason, that should define the headline, the peg, etc. And if possible the author should also accommodate a comment or two about specific privileges not available to most scientists and which might have made the difference in this case.

This post benefited from valuable feedback from Jahnavi Sen.

Feb 15, 2022
Review of a review: ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022)

Tanul Thakur has reviewed a series on SonyLIV called Rocket Boys for The Wire. I haven’t watched the show and don’t plan to, for want of time as well as because, reading Thakur’s review, I think I know enough about how the series depicts the work of Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Jehangir Bhabha vis-à-vis transforming India into a “scientific superpower” (Thakur’s words).

This said, I found some of the statements in Thakur’s review worth additional comments in their own right. For example, Thakur, and presumably Rocket Boys itself, says this duo’s goal was “scientific superpower” status, but this is not true. Neither man was interested in science and the goal of their work was never scientific. They pursued the use of technology for India’s betterment, in line with Nehru’s vision, but neither man aspired to technological superpower status per se either; more importantly, conflating their work with scientific work is detrimental to the public perception of science, especially what the people at large believe constitutes progress towards becoming a scientific superpower. Launching rockets and building nuclear reactors will never get us there – only the non-glamorous work of better funding and administering research and not expecting immediate results can. This distinction, rarefied though it may seem, leads to the second part of Thakur’s review that I’d like to address:

Even though the biopic has exploded as a sub-genre in Hindi cinema over the last decade, profiling a vast range of sportsmen, leaders, even gangsters, it has paid scant attention to Indian scientists. Such depictions are so rare that I remember watching something similar almost eight years ago (a National Award-winning documentary, The Quantum Indians, chronicling the lives of Raman, S.N. Bose and Meghnad Saha). So, Rocket Boys, centred on the personal and professional lives of Bhabha and Sarabhai, is a fresh and long-due departure.

The Quantum Indians, made by Raja Choudhury and released in 2013, had the ridiculous blurb that it concerned the work of three “forgotten” Indian scientists – whereas its subjects were the three most well-known Indian physicists: C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha. The way we have forgotten these men is often at odds with the way we tend to remember them, which is true with Rocket Boys as well. In 2014, Thakur quoted Choudhury as saying: “In 2012, when the [Higgs] Boson particle was announced, there was no conversation on S.N. Bose in international media at all. That riled me a little.” The reason few invoked Bose in that context was because his work had nothing to do with the Higgs boson!

Now, Thakur’s axis with Rocket Boys is that the biopic genre in India has once again finally visited Indian scientists. But to repeat myself, it hasn’t: Sarabhai’s and Bhabha’s contributions weren’t as scientists but as technologists – but to be more accurate, they are best remembered as fine administrators. Both the Department of Atomic Energy and the institution that became ISRO shortly before Sarabhai’s death were the product of Bhabha’s and Sarabhai’s ability to properly define the problems they needed to solve, build good institutions, staff them with the right people, lead them with integrity and, of course, work with the political establishment to have them funded and supported.

Casting Sarabhai and Bhabha as scientists is to mischaracterise, and ultimately gloss over, the precise nature of their achievements; by extension, to recall them as scientists or their work as scientific at this point of time is to continue to believe technological progress will lead to scientific success. (It’s entirely possible that Rocket Boys paid attention to their work as administrators but, given the givens, I don’t have my hopes up.) And in my view this conflation negates this axis of the review: the Indian biopic genre, at least in Hindi, has yet to concern itself with Indian scientists.

Instead, I’d say (again, without having watched it) that Rocket Boys is of a piece with the heightened valorisation of the Indian spaceflight and nuclear power enterprises since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014. Modi has clearly celebrated India’s prowess on these fronts; he has also frequently sought to appropriate spaceflight achievements in particular to make himself and his party look more powerful, smarter, more decisive. In ISRO’s track record, Modi seems to have unfettered access to a slew of accomplishments that he has sought to attach to his own legacy.

As I wrote in my review of Mission Mangal (2019), the film “wouldn’t have been made if not for the nationalism surrounding it – the nationalism bestowed of late upon the Indian space programme by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the profitability bestowed upon nationalism by the business-politics nexus” that his government has fostered. Since 2016, I have also noticed (anecdotally) an uptick in the number of books and articles about the ‘golden’ years of the Indian space programme (which could have been a direct fallout of the prime minister’s view, which influences industry and culture). In the same period, and in a more thoroughly documented trend, ISRO has become more opaque, more petty and averse to failure in a way reminiscent of the Modi government itself. In 2019, ISRO also introduced a Vikram Sarabhai Award with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh for articles that cast ISRO in positive light.

Taken together, it might be more useful to understand Rocket Boys as yet another manifestation of the “hamara ISRO mahaan” sentiment, especially since Thakur also writes that the series ultimately descends into a hagiography of Sarabhai and Bhabha (and Abdul Kalam) – than to consider it as a subject of the more-storied biopic genre.

Featured image: A still from ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022). Source: SonyLIV.

Feb 9, 2022
Are preprints reliable?

To quote from a paper published yesterday in PLOS Biology:

Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.

Later: “A major concern with expedited publishing is that it may impede the rigour of the peer review process.”

So far, according to this and one other paper published by PLOS Biology, it seems reasonable to ask not whether preprints are reliable but what peer-review brings to the table. (By this I mean the conventional/legacy variety of closed pre-publication review).

To the uninitiated: paralleling the growing popularity and usefulness of open-access publishing, particularly in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, some “selective” journals – to use wording from the PLOS Biology paper – and their hordes of scientist-supporters have sought to stress the importance of peer-review in language both familiar and based on an increasingly outdated outlook: that peer-review is important to prevent misinformation. I’ve found a subset of this argument, that peer-review is important for papers whose findings could save/end lives, to be more reasonable, and the rest just unreasonable and self-serving.

Funnily enough, two famously “selective” journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, retracted two papers related to COVID-19 care in the thick of the pandemic – invalidating their broader argument in favour of peer-review as well as the efficiency of their own peer-review processes vis-à-vis the subset argument.

Arguments in favour of peer-review are self-serving because it has more efficient, more transparent and more workable alternatives, yet many journals have failed to adopt them, and have instead used this repeatedly invalidated mode of reviewing papers to maintain their opaque style of functioning, which in turn – and together with the purported cost of printing papers on physical paper – they use to justify the exorbitant prices they charge readers (here’s one ludicrous example).

For example, one alternative is pre-publication peer-review, in which scientists upload their paper to a preprint server, like arXiv, bioRxiv or medRxiv, and share the link with their peers and, say, on social media platforms. There, independent experts review the paper’s contents and share their comments. The paper’s authors can incorporate the necessary changes, with credit, as separate versions of the same paper on the server.

Further, and unlike ‘conventional’ journals’ laughable expectation of journalists to write about the papers they publish without fear of being wrong, journalists subject preprint papers to the same treatment that is due the average peer-reviewed paper as well: with reasonable and courteous scepticism, and to qualify its claims and findings with comments from independent experts – with an added caveat, though I personally think it unnecessary, that their subject is a preprint paper.

(Some of you might remember that in 2018, Tom Sheldon argued in a Nature News & Views article that peer-review facilitates good journalism. I haven’t come across an argument more objectionable in favour of conventional peer-review.)

However, making this mode of reviewing and publishing more acceptable has been very hard, especially for the demand to repeatedly push back against scientists whose academic reputation depends on having published and being able to publish in “selective” journals and the scientometric culture they uphold, and their hollow arguments about the virtues of conventional, opaque peer-review. (Making peer-review transparent could also help deal with reviewers who use the opportunity anonymity affords them to be sexist and racist.)

But with the two new PLOS Biology papers, we have an opportunity to flip these scientists’ and journals’ demand that preprint papers ‘prove’ or ‘improve’ themselves around to ask what the legacy modes bring to the table. From the abstract of the second paper (emphasis added):

We sought to compare the and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical test as a while as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.

It seems to me to be reasonable to ask about the rigour to which supporters of conventional peer-review have staked claim when few papers appear to benefit from it. The process may be justified in those few cases where a paper is corrected in a significant way, and that it may be difficult to identify those papers without peer-review – but pre-publication peer-review has an equal chance of identifying the same errors (esp. if we increase the discoverability of preprints the way journal editors identify eminent experts in the same field to review papers, instead of relying solely on social-media interactions that less internet-savvy scientists may not be able to initiate).

In addition, it appears that in most cases in which preprints were uploaded to bioRxiv first and were then peer-reviewed and published by a journal, the papers’ authors clearly didn’t submit papers that required significant quality improvements – certainly not to the extent to which conventional peer-review’s supporters have alluded to in an effort to make such review necessary.

So, why must conventional peer-review, in the broader sense, persist?

Feb 2, 2022