Intuition

  • Allegra Goodman
Dial Press: 2006. 352 pp. $25 0385336128 | ISBN: 0-385-33612-8

The writer Allegra Goodman is not a scientist, but she certainly could have fooled me. Her latest novel, Intuition, brings back the sights, sounds and smells of a dozen years at the lab bench, stimulating emotions I had forgotten I'd experienced. In lieu of direct research experience, Goodman consulted several scientists in her family and also shadowed some researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge to produce an exacting portrait of the rise and fall of a cancer-biology lab.

When flailing postdoc Cliff stumbles on a potentially big result, joint lab head Sandy Glass appropriates it as fodder for a sorely needed new grant. This goes against the better wishes of his scientific partner Marion Mendelssohn, whose more scrupulous approach is respected but has done the lab few favours. The premature result is coaxed into a Nature paper, and fame and funding soon follow. But when fellow postdoc Robin, who also happens to be Cliff's lover, suspects that the finding has been faked and accuses him, the close-knit lab begins to unravel.

The story is set in the 1980s, the same decade as the ‘Baltimore affair’, in which a researcher, Margot O'Toole, accused her boss, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of fraud and set off a national furore. Yet the story still resonates today: the recent South Korean stem-cell scandal also involved too-good-to-be-true results, lab whistleblowers and the downfall of a mediagenic scientist, Woo Suk Hwang. But Intuition diverts our attention from the bare facts to psychological motives: what might make a successful researcher extend that little bit further into the realm of fudging? You begin to feel that the unthinkable can become at least explainable.

Cliff's alleged fraud is not of the audacious variety epitomized by physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, whose deception led to the retraction of a string of papers in high-profile journals. It is much more interesting, involving cosmetic acts so unconscious that we never know for certain whether they have even taken place, a circumstance that may prevail in many cases of fraud. Aspects of Cliff's data “were so compelling that in his mind they outweighed everything else. He had sifted out what was significant, and the rest had floated off like chaff.” Almost unwittingly, the lab colludes. Infected by Sandy's reckless ebullience, Marion throws caution to the wind: “Doubt had been her scientific ally, the whetstone for her sharpest emotions. Now she struggled against doubt as if it were merely an emotion, and not also a kind of intelligence.”

Despite its deft illumination of laboratory wrongdoings, Intuition has a more serious message about modern science as a career: far from fulfilling, it is actually psychologically damaging. Scientific similes subtly reinforce this: a Chinese postdoc wears his nonchalance “like safety glasses”; Sandy shoots a wounding look “like liquid nitrogen”; Robin is hurt to be “treated like hazardous material, to be isolated and manipulated with gloved hands”.

And postdoctoral angst? It's all here: the dead-end project bestowed with misguided fanfare by a new mentor; fear of being scooped; fear of having to leave the bench to teach; fear of irreproducible results; fear of running out of funding. As early as the first chapter, Cliff's despair “began to melt and pool inside him” until “he was no longer desperate, but simply demoralized and depressed — emotions entirely accepted, even expected, in the lab”. Of another postdoc, we learn that patience, diligence, sarcasm and pessimism “all protected him from failure and hurt”. Science is a “dirty game”, a “cosmic joke”.

Although the book ends in redemption, the aftertaste is still bitter. The scientists have lists of amusing definitions (“experiment: a series of humiliations”), leave warning notes on refrigerators, and engage in postdoctoral banter; such playful antics are astutely observed and very funny, but in the end cannot mitigate the fundamental darkness. All the negative things described in the book ring true, although their concentration in one lab seems to artificially inflate the difficulties of the profession and blunt its periodic joys. Yet in the end, negative aspects make good reading; any ‘lab lit’ novel set in a world as technical as molecular biology must dwell on obstacles to keep the pages turning. And turn they most certainly do.