Slow Science: The Death of the Sniper Scientist

[These ideas on Slow Science are a work-in-progress a first draft of sorts. With some help from those of you who read this post, via a challenge or support, I hope that my thoughts on the subject will eventually become strengthened and clarified. Ultimately, I’d like to see some of this published somewhere in the form of short essays.]

“Our current reality features an unslayable Goliath of commercialism, and modern scientific Davids must make an honorable peace, for a slingshot cannot win this battle…Opportunities for increasing fusion with the world of commerce surround us with almost overwhelming temptation, for the immediate and palable “rewards” are so great. So scientists go to work for competing pharmaceutical or computer companies, make monumental salaries, but cannot choose their topics of research or publish their work.”

This statement came at the end of the first chapter of The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould. This ninth collection of his essays, originally written for the Natural History magazine, is sadly the first Gould book I’ve read. I’m ashamed to say that as an evolutionary and population geneticist, I had not read any Gould (with the exception of The Spandrels paper). Dawkins, yes. Some Haldane and a little bit of Williams, Wright, Fisher and Muller. But my reading list would largely include articles directly related to my topic and are mostly from 1990 and onwards. More importantly, I was under the misguided impression that because my manuscripts are unlikely to include anything prior to that time period, I should probably focus my efforts on learning the current literature.

[Plus, if I can't access it on JSTOR, then I would actually have to WALK to the library. Library, what's that? I thought Google was the library.]

I’m sure that I’m not alone in this sentiment.

Since meeting TheDude, I have felt that my own scientific thinking is narrow and thin and so I’ve started reading more broadly and deeply than my own narrow discipline of genetics. Hence I've started the task of going through the reading list he provided. Gould is on it.

Let’s get back to the quote. Gould used it in the context of explaining why Dr Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an 18th century professor, paleontologist, and physician, fell victim to an absurd fossil hoax. Beringer believed that several fossils he had “found,” which included spiders’ webs, lizards’ eyes and the Hebrew name of God, were authentic. From a modern understanding of fossils, we would laugh at him for being such a dufus because we could see that it was so obviously fake. But Gould argues that at the time, scientists believed that simple organisms arose by spontaneous generation and debated the origin of fossils. Both Berginger’s context and his lack of scientific questioning led him to becoming a patsy.

After describing the hoax, he then makes the statement above. I think he does it for two reasons. First, he believes that the world of intellect and the world of commerce should remain separate because by their intrinsic nature they have different priorities and values. For him, paleontology has devolved into selling trinkets, like coffee mugs, T-shirts and the purchase of Sue the Tyrannosuarus Rex by McDs. These commercial items are akin to the lying stones of Marrakech, ie, they carry no trace of the science from which they were born. Secondly, Gould aruges that social context can affect scientific judgement. If the social context is commerce, then the science will become fakery, “engulfed and destroyed if we make a devil’s bargain of fusion for short-term gain.”

Gould is thinking about the more obvious fusion of commerce and science. I believe however, there is a subtler form. I believe that academic science, this could easily extent to the university itself, has integrated the principles and underlying philosophy of commerce. It is there in how we trained, who we become as scientists and how we carry out the science itself. It is my belief that the subtle fusion of commerce and science likely contributed to the demise of the Sniper Scientist.



In two previous posts, I touched upon the value of studying non-model organisms and long-term studies. In this post, I want to ask what is the Sniper Scientist? Can they persist in this current scientific, social and political environment? And does it matter if this self-sufficient individual goes the way of the Sue the Tyrannosaurus?

[I realize this is a very odd analogy for a Buddhist to be using, but if I were to be truthful, it isn’t mine – credit goes to LivingtheScottishLife. I just ran with it.]

Alexander von Humboldt was the penultimate Sniper Scientist because he was a biologist, a meterologist, a geologist, botanist, philosopher, and a German explorer. According to Phylogenisto, von Humboldt was one of the last scientists that had the time to spend thinking and writing about vastly different scientific disciplines (Kosmos 1845). Clearly as knowledge and scope of a field expands, individuals must specialize, narrowing the scale of their study and expertise. Although no one can possibly straddle that many fields today, I think, as scientists, we can aspire to learn and read broadly.

What is a Sniper Scientist? A sniper is a marksman who excels at hitting the target with precision, in part because s/he possesses highly specialized training and tools. But it is not the specialized training that makes one a sniper. This individual must know the environment, how to camouflage themselves in that environment, infiltrate and conceal, perform reconnaissance, observe both the big picture and the small details, but most of all possess mental strength and patience.

Similarly, a Sniper Scientist must know the environment - be it the ecology of the organism, it’s history, the cellular environment, and/or the genetic background. Knowing the generalities of the environment allows them to know what specific questions to ask and how most appropriately to answer the question. Like the sniper, the Sniper Scientist trains not just in their small area of expertise, but learns skills that are unrelated to their speciality.

As described in an article in The Independent, snipers generally work alone,

"Fully trained snipers must be able to operate with stealth, stalk invisibly through the natural cover of stream beds or dead ground, carrying heavy loads including shorter-range rifles and pistols, and endure sleepless days and nights of waiting. Theirs is not a shot fired in haste."

The key sentence of course is, “Theirs is not a shot fired in haste.”

A Sniper Scientist is likely to wait until all experiments have been conducted, ensure that all the alternatives have been explored, patiently collect as much evidence as possible, and only then do they write the story. A Sniper Scientist is not made in 1 year or even 5 – a Sniper Scientist comes about after solidly and actively working at the bench/field/computer as a scientist for many, many years (personally I like the idea of 10-15 years).

This idea of patience and time is central to what creates a Sniper Scientist. Yet on many blogs, both tenure-track and tenured faculty complain about how they have so very little time to do actual science. Much of their time is sucked away writing grants to get money to let someone else do the science. My supervisor, TenuredMe said to me the other day that she spends half her time in meetings. And my old PhD supervisor once told me that she thought working in a coffee shop would preferable to her current position because it would give her more time to do science than being a professor. So if all of a faculty’s time is spent in meetings, writing grants, performing service, and teaching, do they have the time it takes to be that Sniper Scientist? Well the answer is – no. But does it matter?

Enter, The Collaborator(s).

I’m sure that many of us have noticed how the number of authors on any one paper has grown, what seems in my mind, exponentially. Perhaps it came as a consequence of the field expanding because technology advanced so quickly after PCR was discovered in 1983. The first genome to be sequenced was that of phiX174 in 1977 and then in 1995, bakers’s yeast had its genome fully sequenced. Prior to genome sequencing back in the early 60s and 70s, did faculty have to depend on collaborators to the extent that they do now? Is this multi-author publication phenomena confined to a field like genetics, which intrinsically depends on technology and thus collaboration?

In order to answer this question, I trawled the Web of Science. I queried all the publications with the word “genes” in it for the years 1955-1964, 1965-1974, 1975-1984, 1985-1994, 1995-2004, 2005-2010. Then, I sampled from that entire set of publications and used this as my data to count the number of single author, two authors, three authors and four or more authors. Ideally, I would have used the entire set of publications – but then you’d be old, grey, and tired of waiting for this final installment of the Slow Series.



Figure 1 is the data plotted as a histogram. For publications that have the word “genes” in it, the switch to more than 4 authors on a publication happened somewhere in the early 1970s. Perhaps after the discovery of PCR in 1983 by Kary Mullis, the field of genetics became so technologically advanced and specialized that collaboration was the only way to practically publish a paper. In order to pin point the exact transition year, we’d have to do this but for each year. My guess is that it would come around the time genome sequencing started - the field expands and the expertise narrows and collaboration is necessary. Technology drives up the number of authors, right?

So then this shouldn’t be true in a field like ecology where something like next high throughput genome sequencing is unlikely to impact the publication of research. Well I did the same thing but instead of querying a word, I just looked at a sample of publications in the premier ecological journal Ecology, counting authors in the years 1955-1964, 1965-1974, 1975-1984, 1985-1994, 1995-2004, and 2005-2010.



In Figure 2b, you can see that there is some kind of transition happening in the early 1990s. This also appears to be true in the journal Evolution (International Journal of Organic Evolution), established in the 1940s. So what happened around there to create the momentum towards multi-author papers? I think the reason we see papers with four or more authors in a field like Ecology is likely due to the increased use of computing in science – analytical modeling, simulations, sophisticated statistical models etc.


Multi-author publications means that we are specializing as scientists. And the reason for this specialization is what economic theory calls the comparative advantage. Imagine two researchers: Jo and Kris. Jo is a biologist who just completed an enormous greenhouse study for the purpose of finding the QTLs underlying reproductive isolation in two sympatric species that Jo studies. Jo is interested in getting genetic data that will complement the phenotypic traits that Jo believes are largely responsible for driving divergence in the two species. In Jo’s smallish lab, it would, however, take 2 years to produce the genetic data, analyze and publish it.

Kris is a prof at another university, who specializes in producing and analyzing next generation sequencing data. It would take Kris 6 months to produce and analyze genetic data. Kris is also interested in mapping adaptive traits but it would take 1 year to perform the crosses on the organism of Kris’ choice. Kris could produce a QTL map in less time than Jo, so Kris doesn’t really need Jo. But if Kris provided Jo with the bioinformatics data and resources and Jo provided the phenotypic data and raw material for the genetics then both Kris and Jo could save 1 year of work. They would specialize and trade. The more they did this, the better they would become at their respective skills and the more time they would eventually save. According to Matt Ridley, the gains from this economic trade can and will grow making both parties much more prosperous.

“Exchange creates the momentum for more specialization which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on. Prosperity is the saving of time and satisfying your needs. We draw upon specialization to raise each others living standards.”

Ridley would suggest that without this form of skills and idea exchange, scientific progress would slow down and could even regress. This level of communication and cooperation can only accelerate innovation. (Watch his TED talk to see his description of why the Neaderthals went extinct.)

I can think of at least two consequences to this kind of super specialization. It may be true that more hands on board means that the average cost of producing a publication drops, but what is expected from any single publication increases in scale and complexity. With the increased complexity and scale, this might lead to a situation where no one scientist possesses the skills to carry out the scientific endeavour all on their own. Could we as scientists, find ourselves in a situation described by Lawrence W. Reed in I, Pencil where,

“No one person—repeat, no one, no matter how smart or how many degrees follow his name—could create from scratch a small, everyday pencil, let alone a car or an airplane.”

Scientists work and create ideas within their social and psychological contexts. And if that context becomes an environment where self-sufficiency is described as poverty, then we might lose the Sniper Scientists altogether. It's important to give scientists freedom from economic constraints to allow them to spend their days immersed in experimentation and observation. Innovation is not just born of exchange, but also comes from incremental individual discoveries.

I don't know if this is a benefit to progress or a devil's bargain. I think there is still much evidence still needed to draw any conclusions. I’d like, however, to end with a dedication that I found in my used copy of The Lying Stones of Marrakech, because it so beautifully captures some of the ideas that I’ve tried to explore in this post.

“The wonder of our world and universe are best reveled by the scientific process. Scientific critical thinking is an invaluable tool that can be learned and we hope that these books will help you develop an appreciation and understanding of all that is natural. Science is not a list of facts. It is a process that is often long, messy and full of wrong turns and errors. The scientific journey is well worth the effort. The scientific mind must be open to new ideas, but also skeptical of ideas that do not fit into our understanding of how the natural world works. Science demands proof, evidence that can be verified. In science we do not “believe,” we accept things that are supported by “good” evidence. One does not have to be a scientist to use scientific critical reasoning. Remember to keep your mind open, but not so open that your brain falls out.”
All the best,
Walt and Kris.