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The seven deadly curs’d sins … Ire
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Syd, Uncle |
| Copyright Year | 1997 |
| Abstract | Dear Willie,After your call I thought I should write to try to persuade you not to take any of the drastic steps you were contemplating yesterday. Anger has only scalar properties; it has magnitude but no particular direction. I know you are furious about having your papers turned down, but threatening the editor with public horse-whipping or sending him a letter bomb, although clearly attractive, are a bit ludicrous, and unlikely to give you any real satisfaction.I am not saying that you should swallow your anger and forget about the episode completely. What you will find is that the wheel of fortune can often turn uncannily in your favour, and wrath contained and remembered can often yield pleasant revenge. I am now going to tell you a story you must promise not to repeat to anybody at all, which is why this letter has “Burn, then read” written on it, although I assume you ignored that. It concerns the editor of an important biological journal who had submitted work for a PhD in biochemistry. I had been appointed the external examiner. We read the submitted material, and then there was an oral examination during which I asked a few eccentric questions. I then retired to a room, and drafted a report along the following lines:“This thesis deals with the subject of gene expression and especially with the expression of genes in mammalian cells. Parts of it are very speculative and not supported by any direct experimental evidence. These sections could form the contents of another thesis for submission to a different faculty in the university, perhaps Moral Sciences or Divinity. The remainder of the work is quasi-repetitive, repeating on humans experiments that have already been extensively carried out on tardigrades and kangaroos. This might well be submitted for a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Bishop's Stortford, where it will find the audience it so richly deserves. I am unable to recommend the award of the degree as it is not up to our standard, but I hope that the candidate can be encouraged to submit again when his work has reached a more definitive stage.”He got his PhD because I threw the draft away and instead produced a standard report. This was not because I knew that the internal examiner, who behaved in a polite — some might say fawning — way, would have refused to accept the draft version. Instead it had dawned on me that I had no objective grounds for exacting the vengeance I had planned, because I had never had a paper rejected by that particular editor. Nor would it have been right for me to act as the agent for the host of unknown authors who had received rejection letters from him, as I was then the editor of another journal and had honed the skill of writing such letters to a fine art. But most importantly, if the editor's PhD had been denied, and had he then discovered that it was on account of what I had written, if he had any sense, he would have waited for the wheel of fate to turn again, as it must do by reason of symmetry. I saw myself as an aged man, living in poverty, and begging him for some part-time work, such as reading proofs or even making the office tea, while he enjoyed the pleasure of a terrible vengeance.Nothing I have said applies to anger directed against inanimate objects, and particularly against experiments that do not work. I strongly support the right of everybody to shake incubators with rage, to kick centrifuges with fury, and to smash test tubes that absolutely refuse to give the right answer. I am told that expressing your anger in this way is much better that swearing at your technicians or going home and beating up your wife and children. However, I think such action goes beyond pure personal therapy; it is very important to discipline all those recalcitrant pieces of lab junk to bring them into line and show them that you are not one to submit easily to defeat, especially if it is their fault.I can hear you dismissing psychokinesis as claptrap, but I have some astonishing experimental results to support it. The late George Streisinger and I one night decided to test the psychokinetic effect. We took two sets of Petri dishes, A and B, and I asked George to put stack A on the left and B on the right in the incubator before we went home. At home, we were to concentrate our thoughts on stack A and instruct it to “Grow, grow”, and then focus our minds on stack B, telling it: “Don’t grow, don’t grow.” Next day we found that the only difference between the stacks was a slight positive bias towards growth in the B stack. In discussing what had gone wrong, I discovered that George had mistakenly put stack A on the right and B on the left in the incubator and it immediately became clear that the experiment was a great success. Because of the switch of plates, we had largely neutralised one another's powers, with the small positive bias in stack B being the result of my stronger psychokinetic force, possibly because I lived closer to the lab than George.We tried to get this experiment published but failed because the referees kept on asking for controls. They could never see that this was one of those rare experiments that is its own control. Yours. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1016/S0960-9822(06)00264-8 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/pii/S0960982206002648 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982206002648 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822%2806%2900264-8 |
| Volume Number | 7 |
| Journal | Current Biology |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
