Jennifer Byrne is Head of the Molecular Oncology Laboratory within the Oncology Research Unit at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. She is also a conjoint Associate Professor and Deputy Postgraduate Coordinator within the University of Sydney Discipline of Paediatrics and Child Health.

The nice thing about writing for the WISENet journal is that during the weeks that it takes me to put hands to the keyboard, my original idea for an article manages to change into something quite different. In this case, what began as a review of a single book has turned into something broader — and hopefully more broadly interesting as well.

I’m someone for whom there’s no greater luxury than to be reading a book. Note that in this article, the term “book” does NOT include “PhD thesis”, even though PhD theses are also books, and I often read them. In fact, I have a rule of never mixing PhD theses and books, as if I’m meant to be reading a thesis, the book will always be open, whereas the PhD thesis will remain unexamined. For this reason, reading a book now symbolises that most wonderful and rare of commodities — free time.

However, as in the case of true love, my relationship with books hasn’t always run smooth. As a child, like many non-sporty kids (before the advent of computers and the like), I would literally read anything that I could get my hands on. Enid Blyton books, kids’ encyclopaedias, years of issues of the New Idea magazine were all systematically devoured. My reading habits led to books being banned at the meal table, but if any book was discovered and taken away, I’d simply read the cereal box instead. Once I was in high school, English became a favourite subject. I particularly enjoyed the dissection of literary texts in years 11 and 12. What was the author trying to say? And why?? Even though we were reading books from the previous century, it seemed that there was still something new to discover between those pages.

My relationship with books changed somewhat when I started a science degree at the University of Queensland. There was no longer a balance between languages and science, and instead I became immersed in a world of hard edges: facts, formulae, multiple-choice exams. Things were either right or very, very wrong. After two years of this, on the rare occasions where we were asked to write an essay, I found myself unable to string words together in the way that I had previously found so easy to do. I discussed this with a friend at the time, who was studying law (“studying” being used in the loosest sense of the term). His immediate response was “Well, what are you reading at the moment?” “Reading!!” I remember shrieking, “Who has time for reading??” His response has stayed with me ever since: “If you’re not reading anything, how can you expect to be able to write???”

This made me rethink the value of reading. I had come to regard this as an almost guilty pleasure, and not something that actually might have value. However, the problem of finding time for reading remained. Life was divided between University studies, a busy social life, and the issue of earning money. This didn’t leave much time for sitting down with a book. The situation continued until the middle of my PhD studies, when my attitude to reading turned around dramatically the day my PhD supervisor told me about the “fantastic novel” that he was reading. I remember my jaw literally dropping in amazement. Here was surely the busiest person on the planet — a University professor, clinician, laboratory head and father of three — reading a book!! For fun!!! Well, I thought, if this person can find time for reading, so can I. Reading for fun was therefore resumed, with a vengeance. And rather than reading to escape from everyday life, as I had in the past, I started to seek out books that were somehow related to life at the laboratory bench. This was partly to help me understand the community of scientists that I’d chosen to join, and partly to find out whether anybody, apart from scientists themselves, understood the process of science and what made it work.

One of the books from this period that has influenced me ever since is “Life Among the Scientists: an Anthropological Study of an Australian Scientific Community”. This was written by a team of anthropologists (Max Charlesworth, Lyndsay Farrall, Terry Stokes, and David Turnbull) about the Walter and Eliza Hall institute in Melbourne. The authors tried to dissect the social functioning of the institute in the same way that they might examine an isolated jungle tribe. Traditions and beliefs were described objectively, in order to explain the current values and consequent behaviour of the researchers. For me, it was a fascinating reminder that scientists are above all people in communities, and these communities require traditions, conventions and beliefs if they are to be sustained and grow over time.

A more recent favourite has been “A Beautiful Mind”, by Sylvia Nasar. This biography of the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash came to my attention when it was a finalist for the Rhone-Poulenc science writing award, and was subsequently turned into a highly successful film, starring Russell Crowe. Having read the book before the film was produced, I wondered what moviegoers would make of the reprinted text inside its now glossy, air-brushed cover. It was not just the book cover that the film had air-brushed — most of the less tidy aspects of John Nash’s remarkable story had been similarly erased. However, if you’re interested in the lives of scientists behind their achievements, you really can’t do better than “A Beautiful Mind”. John Nash emerges as a complex, incomprehensible, infuriating and yet admirable character; a reminder that these qualities can’t always be neatly separated. Exceptional people tend to be driven to behave exceptionally, and not always in ways that society admires and approves.

But finally, I come to the book which I intended to review in the first place, which is “Intuition”, by Allegra Goodman. Whereas the previously-mentioned authors wrote about real events and people, Goodman created a fictional research institute and laboratory, with astonishing precision. “Intuition” has largely received attention as an examination of scientific fraud, and indeed, this is what has attracted many readers, including myself. I’ve always had a secret fascination for scientific fraud, which I see as the scientific equivalent of going over to the dark side. I very clearly remember my French postdoctoral advisor telling me that a scientist’s problems really begin the day that someone in their research group starts “making it up”.

On the surface, fraud is certainly what “Intuition” is about. The story centres around Cliff and Robin, two postdoctoral scientists working in the same laboratory. Cliff is a golden boy who’s somehow failing to live up to expectations, and likewise Robin, older and more experienced, is also seeing her career slipping from her grasp. When we first meet them, they 22 are also becoming an item, in part due to long hours spent together in the laboratory (and who hasn’t seen that happen?) Cliff is in trouble with the two laboratory heads, as he somehow hasn’t been able to spin his talent and charm into the laboratory equivalent of gold — the ‘right’ kind of results. He is on the verge of being thrown out, when he suddenly makes an amazing observation. His fortunes thereby reverse, and he is treated as a hero and saviour instead, and even given hands-on help with his experiments. This is surely the postdoctoral equivalent of hitting the jackpot! Ironically, help is first sought from Robin, who’s told to stop working on her seemingly dead-end project, to fast-track Cliff ’s emerging paper. (And who hasn’t seen that happen?) Robin is of course unhappy to be detoured from her own work, and assigned as a handmaiden to her younger colleague. However things worsen considerably when Robin discovers that she can’t reproduce Cliff ’s results. When she decides to act as a lone whistleblower, their relationship sours, and we see the laboratory members’ allegiances fracture and realign, depending upon who believes (or wishes to believe) whom. This is an amazingly real description of the different ways individuals — and institutions — react to, and deal with allegations of fraud.

However, as much as “Intuition” is about fraud, it also contains a strong sub-text about the influence of gender in science and academia. Allegra Goodman captures the dilemmas faced by female bench scientists with a great deal of subtlety. We see Robin, somewhere in her thirties, without a secure job or home-life (which have all been put on hold while she chases her scientific dreams) knowing that time is running out on all fronts. It is also clear that she faces a family who lacks understanding of her choice of career. Her father, in particular, can’t understand why she bothered to become a “doctor”, only to be paid so badly. It is perhaps because Robin’s dream is so important to her, that she cannot tolerate the thought of anyone succeeding through dishonest means. Allegra Goodman also quietly captures the transplanted lives of women who follow their scientist husbands half-way around the world, to live in strange countries while their husbands lock themselves away in a laboratory. A lot of the behaviours described are portrayed as neither healthy nor sustainable, but this is what obtaining “good results” demands. And while science is portrayed as a culture which tolerates individuality and even eccentricity, there are clearly-portrayed swift and definitive punishments for anyone who transgresses its unwritten laws.

In the end, it is left suitably unclear exactly what happened with Cliff ’s early experiments. This appropriately highlights the fact that much of scientific misconduct is probably unintentional, with only a minority of offences being calculated and planned. Most importantly, “Intuition” serves to remind us that science is done by people, and in their very real desire to reach some immutable, unshakeable truth, this humanity is both a help, and a hindrance.

If any readers are interested in other books set in laboratories, visit the Lab Lit website http://www.lablit.com/, which devoted to “the culture of science in fiction and fact”.

And pass on my friend’s advice— if you wish to be able to write well, don’t forget to read.