The problem with experts

Lately I've been thinking more generally about the control of information. Institutional schools train people to look to the experts rather than to hunt down information on their own, as I argued in my last post. Educating yourself gives you the freedom to seek out non-mainstream opinions, and that's a very good thing, because the 'expert' system has some serious flaws. I'm starting to think of this system as an intellectual oligarchy, for which we are prepared by decades of schooling.

A dangerous problem with the oligarchy is that people are required to make a name for themselves in an area of research before their results will be taken seriously. You could make an astounding scientific discovery, but if it's not in your field, if you have no previous publications on the topic (publications which usually require a PhD), if you're not from the right sort of university, well, good luck getting it published. If this sounds a bit exaggerated, please keep reading, because I have a rather horrifying example.

I was reading Flu by Gina Kolata some time ago, about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic which broke out at the end of World War I, and killed far more people than the war did. The virus is estimated to have infected at least one fifth of all living people, and killed more than 2% of the human population worldwide. It killed almost 13,000 people in Philadelphia in a period of weeks. In many US cities they could not bury their dead.

Naturally, it has been of tremendous interest to determine the genes of this virus. One question is why this flu triggered a "cytokine storm," in which a person essentially is drowned by their own T-cells, which are trying to fight the virus. T-cells flood the lungs until oxygen is cut off and the person dies. Other flus do not kill in this way, and other flus usually kill the very young or the elderly, while the 1918 flu was most deadly to those aged 20 to 40. It was suspected that the 1918 virus was evolved from an avian flu, but DNA would help shed light on its origins-- and help us recognize the next virulent avian virus that might cause a similar pandemic. This is of particular interest right now, since the H5N1 avian flu in Asia has evolved to be contagious between humans, and may have broken out in China. (Excellent H5N1 news here.)

S0... enter Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, an army pathologist. Dr. Taubenberger found lung tissue samples from a WWI soldier, preserved in paraffin in an army warehouse. His team identified the flu virus within the tissue. They developed a method for determining the genes of the virus. Let me quote from Kolata's book, pp. 215-216:

By October 1996, the group was ready to tell the world that they had genetic evidence of the 1918 flu in the preserved lung tissue of Roscoe Vaughan. They would write a scientific paper explaining their astonishing result. They did not have the entire genetic sequence of the virus yet, but they had shown that they could pull the viral genes out. That meant that they eventually might know the virus in its every detail. They had the tools to unmask the murderer and even find its deadly weapon.

The scientists decided to send their paper to Nature. Certain that what they had found was electrifying, they gave the journal editors advance notice that their paper was on its way. "I emailed the Washington office of Nature," Taubenberger said. "An hour and a half later, I got a phone call from London," from the editorial offices of the journal, "saying, 'This is really great, send it right in.'" He did, expecting that "this paper would get sucked right in," published posthaste. But, to Tauben­berger’s amazement, upon receiving his paper, Nature sent it right back, rejecting it without even mailing it to experts for review. The journal included its standard rejection note, explaining that the flu paper was not interesting enough for review.

Baffled, Taubenberger then sent the paper to Science, Nature’s chief rival and an equally prestigious journal.

But Science magazine, apparently, was just as aloof. "We sent the paper to Science and they just bumped it," Taubenberger said. Why? Perhaps the scientists looking at the paper questioned the group from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. "It gave the flu community a shock to think that a non-flu person was working on this flu project," Taubenberger speculates. "In the flu community, people may not have heard of us." Only after some senior scientists intervened on Taubenberger’s behalf was his paper sent out for review. Then, he said, the reviewers were enthusiastic about the paper and it was accepted for publication. But Taubenberger was shaken by the experience. "It scared the hell out of us," he said. "I thought it would never get published." After all, he adds, he had no experience with high-profile science and he just assumed that if he did something really important, major journals would jump at the chance to publish it....

But Taubenberger was unaware of the games journals and reviewers—who sometimes are ignorant, sometimes are jealous, sometimes have undisclosed conflicts of interest—can play.

This story still amazes me. If the these academic oligarchs are willing to throw away an opportunity to prepare for the greatest immediate threat facing humanity, simply because the researcher is not an ordained expert on the topic, they are clearly willing to risk anything to preserve their control over new information.