Smoke and mirrors

Smoke and mirrors A crusty old professor in my previous department used to say that science was a dog competition: you may have raised a mutt but, with a few combs and ribbons, you could win best of show. A paper, the wisdom goes, should be a carefully crafted narrative in which you present the truth framed in a logical, consistent and – above all – aesthetically pleasing manner. Of course, the crusty old prof wasn’t advocating telling fibs, but he certainly encouraged his students and postdocs to present only the best images and to talk them up effusively in the results section. I’m not convinced that even the snappiest prose could make my last western blot look like anything other than a piece of film trampled by a swarm of insects let loose in an ink factory. But while I agree that presentation is very important, I often feel uncomfortable with the lengths some researchers go to massage their stories. Take Vesicle Vera, for example. Vera has been grappling with a recalcitrant theory for over a year. She has carefully assembled two different lines of evidence that the biology is, indeed, playing out in the manner she hypothesizes. But a third line of evidence isn’t anywhere near as solid. Over the months, she’s spun out hundreds of electron micrographs, only about half of which display the sort of structures that would be consistent with her theory. Her boss was pushing her to publish, but what was she to do with the iffy images? Vera’s instinct was to leave out the electron micrograph experiments altogether and come up with a different way of examining the morphology problem, perhaps one on the basis of another sort of imaging technique. After all, the other two techniques showed a rock-solid result, so it was possible that the electron microscopy (EM) wasn’t revealing the postulated structures more often simply for technical reasons. If she actually showed the duff pictures, it would undermine her hypothesis. But Vera’s boss was firmly convinced that, because some of the images looked good, only An occasional column, in which Mole and other characters share their views on various aspects of life-science research. Correspondence for Mole and his friends can be sent to mole@biologists.com, and may be published in forthcoming issues.