I pick through Lapham’s Quarterly every few months, and today, I picked
up the issue titled “Animals.” (Each issue has an overarching theme, I
think, because Louis Lapham likes to anthologize.) One of the pieces was from Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, written in the 1920s.

Beston observed seabirds on the Cape Cod beach, “each one individually busy for his individual body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined… . By what means, by what methods of communication does this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we to believe that these birds, all of them, are machinae, as Descartes long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely alike that each cogwheeled brain, encountering the same environmental forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? Or is there some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow through them and between them as they fly? …

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

It’s refreshing to read prose that reaches toward a grander plane than scientific (formulaic?) prose. I’m sure that Beston wrestled with the distinction of scientific exposition and, well, poetry. After all, he observed, “Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”

Rhetoric does matter, even still. And maybe over the past week or so, Yvonne Brill’s obituary has been studied far, far more keenly than any other obit appearing in the past year or so. In its originally published version, at least, the piece actually might have been effective because it broke rhetorical rules, not because it complied with them. But the kerfuffle that ensued after ”Yvonne Brill, a Pioneering Rocket Scientist, Dies at 88” appeared in the New York Times on March 30, 2013, showed that form and reader expectation (that is, rhetoric) still matters. Douglas Martin wrote the piece, and I was fortunate enough to have read the initial version. What you see today on the web is not what was originally published.

The offending line was the first, and it involved beef stroganoff. Katie Roiphe lays the trouble out in her ”Obit Gaffe“ [slate.com]. Her essay shows the troublesome line, along with how it is objectionable; and she provides links to responses that are more vitriolic. But Megan Garber’s ”What’s an Obituary For?” [theatlantic.com] that appeared on April 1 explores the controversy with well tuned sensibilities of a writer and close reader. She pays attention to the dislocations of the genre of the obituary that cropped up in the piece and how that form reflects and reinforces cultural and social expectations and requirements.

“The obituary is a life made normative,” Garber observed. “And so we read about Yvonne Brill, after her death, not because she is interesting (which she is), or because she was loved (which she was), but because her life reflects — in a broad and collectively calculated way — what we have decided to value, publicly and explicitly, as human accomplishment. Obits denude, by design. They are not eulogies, or even elegies, but object lessons: They strip away almost all the facts of somebody’s life so that the life may be refigured as a fable. They turn humans into allegories.”

The trouble that Yvonne Brill’s obituary in the Times scared up was in part a matter of equality of the sexes and in part a matter of rhetoric — the play of words and listeners, of expression and expectation. Women’s rights figure into the set of expectations that now frame the way we recognize our dead, and that perhaps is a sign that society has taken note of women’s achievement as a core of culture.

Stephen’s talk and the science of manifold data

Stephen Friend, the president, co-founder, and director of Sage Bionetworks, gave a Hematology/Oncology Grand Rounds talk at Duke on 13 February. He called it “Integrating Genomes and Networks to Understand Health and Disease: If Not Now, Then When?” Although to say so oversimplifies the real message, Stephen urges us to move beyond symptoms-based view of health and disease toward a more complex view derived from complex and comprehensive data. This shift to manifold data — not just “big” but also “broad” data — shapes scientific inquiry: we begin to migrate from hypothesis-driven science toward data-driven science, capturing a more complex picture of biology in the process.

“Doing this kind of science doesn’t become any easier just because you acknowledge complexity,” he cautioned.

Disease, and especially cancer, is not simple, and our descriptions and explanations oversimplify. Stephen has a perspective that’s been informed by stints in academe, pharmaceuticals, and biotech. He’s played an influential role in deepening biomedical data over the past decade. And yet, he said, as impressive as the insights these data reveal, they are but “narrow slices.” Explaining complexity of disease with them, Stephen said (in a delightful simile), “is almost like you’re trying to tell the story of a movie by looking at a single frame.”

I agree. We are doing a new kind of science — or, perhaps more accurately, we’re thinking about a new way of explaining the Scientific Project: from a rhetoric of the neatly ordered processes of hypothesis-driven steps toward a way of thinking about that discovery as less ordered, more accommodating of influences and the products of interaction, even unnervingly accepting of serendipity. And, of course, that new explanation will accept the remit of manifold data and the difficulties and ambiguities that come with their complexity.

Auctoritas

Be clear about one thing, though: this change of science is not just about method. It’s not just a matter of doing analysis of different kinds of data or using more mind-bending statistical methods or talking with colleagues more frequently (in order to “cross pollinate” and feel all “interdisciplinary”).

The change evokes a shift of authority grounding the whole enterprise. That’s the challenge, especially for large and established academic research organizations.

The Latin word auctoritas denotes the kind of force that “augments” action. It guides in a manner “more than advice and less than command” (Theodore Mommsen). It ordains, in the sense of ordering and setting to rights. And, in Stephen’s talk, the issues of auctoritas came forth as I had hoped they would.

Publication and auctoritas. Of course, true to etymology, publication authorship reflects the shifting of auctoritas. “Patients who give you their data will tell you to publish as a group,” Stephen observed as he described a new and highly involved vision of patient engagement in research. No more jockeying for first or last author or languishing in the mediocre middle. Following the example of GitHub and open source software development, contributions to a biomedical research project would be associated with individuals in a much more detailed fashion: credit is given atomically and is based on activity, not bestowed after the fact by a principal investigator or senior author.

Stephen juxtaposed the title page from the first Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1666) with GitHub. While the comparison is interesting, a focus on the medium of communication is, I think, really not at the crux of the matter. The Philosophical Transactions embody an entirely different set of authorities — reflected in the last two words of the publication name, of course — from those embodied in GitHub. And the contrast even has a bit of humor: GitHub is a hub or meeting place for “gits” (a nest of ninnies to use seventeenth century coinage). Using “gits” as a source of talent and progress is really the revolutionary thing here.

Data, the public, and auctoritas. At one time, medical researchers kept their careers, quite literally, in the freezer — where biological samples for investigations were preserved. Now, careers are also kept on hard drives, where data derived from samples resides. The result in academic research culture is a set of “tenure feudal states” where fiefdoms secure and protect their resources, derive their stature from their use, and create alliances by leveraging those resources.

But what happens when emerging scientific questions overmatch the resources of any “feudal state”?

In part the appeal for more comprehensive data ends up breaking the borders of the feudal states. Stephen seeks to open up data much as he wants to change authorship. The fiefdom of the academic lab is replaced by an appeal to “citizens.” Consent is a key, and on this front Sage Bionetworks has been quite ingenious with “Portable Legal Consent.” (See weconsent.us for a new model of research consent developed by John Wilbanks, Sage’s “chief commons officer” and his colleagues.) The involvements of the public in the frameworks of research that Stephen set forth involve not just surrendering samples to research overlords. The new framework calls upon “citizens” to play roles of “citizens as patients,” “citizens as scientists,” and “citizens as funders.”

I like to think of this as a republic of data, though I think the structures still need some working out. (The classicist in me recalls Cicero’s concern about auctoritas, and his observation that in the Roman Republic, ”Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit” — “Power is in the people, while authority is in the Senate.”) Stephen recognizes where the power resides (and he’s a Ciceronean in that regard!); the mechanisms of auctoritas are less clear, and the emerging innovations like Portable Legal Consent, patient/citizen foundations and research organizations are exploring avenues (a few examples here, here, here, and here).

As the old chestnut goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Stephen said that he saw the changes taking “years if not decades,” so I do think he sees the enormity of the change and the kind of deep-rooted resistance that changes like this inevitably encounter.

Clearly, the kind of shift that Stephen laid out could be an existential threat to existing frameworks for academic science. Questions after the presentation brought up that threat, and Stephen’s responses (I think) were more reassuring and sanguine than mine would have been. By resituating authority that “augments” and undergirds scientific endeavor, you change things radically. The face of academic research institutions will have to change if scientists in those institutions want to take part in “integrating genomes and networks to understand human health and disease.” Stephen hopes that the depth of expertise that today’s framework enables and nurtures can be complemented by this new direction. I hope so, too, but its authority will not be undiminished.

I wrote to Stephen after his talk, “I was pleased that you used the theme of institutional renewal as a parallel theme to the science. Of course, these are intertwined, though scientists like to talk about ‘findings’ and ‘results’ absent of the machinery used to uncover them.” I hope we can proceed with a feeling of institutional renewal, for creating a new auctoritas for this new science is a good and necessary undertaking. It’s been done before. It’s actually nice that I post this on Galileo’s birthday, but his circumstance also serves as a caution: He spent his later years under house arrest for the changes he was forced to recant.