Everyday Practice of Science by Frederick Grinnell – review

This is an insider's view of science. You thought science was all about dispassion, objectivity, open-minded logic? Think again: scientists follow hunches, pursue intuitions, have moments of exultation and despair, and fail to see the real significance of negative results. Only you wouldn't necessarily know that from this book.

Professor Grinnell pursues his arguments so dispassionately that I honestly thought, for a moment, he was sending science up by composing a chapter in the style of a research paper. But no, we get science as seen by Robert Merton and Thomas Kuhn (people I will now never need to read, having seen them cited so often); science as framed by research publication; and science as witnessed by Peter Medawar and François Jacob.

And we get the linear model. "Facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected. The scientific method is used to make discoveries. Researchers are dispassionate and objective," he writes. "Although representative of the way we teach science, I believe the linear model corresponds to a mythical account – or at least a significant distortion – of everyday practice," he adds. Note the passive voice, the present tense, the phrasing, the pace, the response. He does not say: "Dispassionate and objective? Not bloody likely!" Instead he says he believes the linear model corresponds to a mythical account. But persevere. He does a lot of serious thinking aloud about big themes in science: discovery and credibility and integrity and (perhaps all the more pointedly because he is an academic biologist who works in Dallas, Texas, among the biblical fundamentalists) the nature of faith.

At every point, he keeps his cool. "If your religion requires six literal days of creation then it clashes with science, but if your religion teaches that the unseen order of the world has purpose and meaning, then are you at odds with science?" he asks.

The chapter on informed consent and risk in medical research is full of valuable thinking: it is, necessarily, addressed to US researchers subject to US law but the principles implicit in the discussion matter to everybody. Out of the sententious diagrams (one of them has words like "principal investigator" and "research papers" and "research grants" with arrows pointing in all directions) and the perfectly self-effacing prose, very good things emerge, including a sense of the writer as a warm, fair-minded and thoughtful human being with a finely tuned sense of propriety. He chooses beautiful and apposite quotations from Francis Collins, Albert Einstein and the painter Joan Miro in half a page, and punctiliously includes the references.

He pays tribute more than once to Mr Perkins, his seventh grade science teacher, who once told him: "Science is serious play." He even devotes a paragraph to the other possible titles for his book (I am glad he discarded Intentionality of Science). In his acknowledgements he insists that the ideas he discusses are his own "and do not represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health". Racy it isn't. But good it is.