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pktechgirlbackupFor me, the coolest story in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was just how virulent her cells had become. A good number of other human cell cultures had either never been truly successful, or had been contaminated and outcompeted by the HeLa cells, driving them to extinction. There were hints of this very early on, but it couldn't be conclusively proven until genetic marker identification became available. When it did, it showed that a lot of research that researchers thought they were doing on specific tissue-type cells (e.g. liver cells) had in fact been done on cervical cancer cells. Oops. If this were true, it would have completely invalidated thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of peoples life work. So they did what any human being would do under the circumstances and denied it was a problem. (Spoiler: it definitely was, and their lifes work was invalid).
The fact that one little mistake could invalidate everything someone had done from age 22 on is a side effect of how specialized scientific research has become. You spend years in general education, then field education, then your tiny tiny subspeciality. Then you spend all your time working on one little problem, probably with one method because learning new methods or new problems just takes too much time.
Contrast this with the scientists in The Enlightenment, which I am an expert on because I read Quicksilver, a fiction book about many of them. Admittedly they wasted a lot of time on ideas that later information revealed to be batshit insane, and they were constantly worried about being scooped by one another, but they had substantially fewer eggs in any one basket. If your calculus proof was scooped by Leibniz, you still had your study of lenses to feel good about. And the guy you beat to lenses can feel good about founding cell biology. It was in many ways a more humane system than our current one, which requires such specialization that you're boxed in by necessity.
I feel like this might be tied in to how insane competition for schooling has been. You have to get into the gifted kindergarten so you can get pre-calc in middle school so you get calc in high school and finish your engineering pre-reqs by sophmore year so you can begin to specialize. It's painful to those involved and I don't even think it's that efficient.
The fact that one little mistake could invalidate everything someone had done from age 22 on is a side effect of how specialized scientific research has become. You spend years in general education, then field education, then your tiny tiny subspeciality. Then you spend all your time working on one little problem, probably with one method because learning new methods or new problems just takes too much time.
Contrast this with the scientists in The Enlightenment, which I am an expert on because I read Quicksilver, a fiction book about many of them. Admittedly they wasted a lot of time on ideas that later information revealed to be batshit insane, and they were constantly worried about being scooped by one another, but they had substantially fewer eggs in any one basket. If your calculus proof was scooped by Leibniz, you still had your study of lenses to feel good about. And the guy you beat to lenses can feel good about founding cell biology. It was in many ways a more humane system than our current one, which requires such specialization that you're boxed in by necessity.
I feel like this might be tied in to how insane competition for schooling has been. You have to get into the gifted kindergarten so you can get pre-calc in middle school so you get calc in high school and finish your engineering pre-reqs by sophmore year so you can begin to specialize. It's painful to those involved and I don't even think it's that efficient.
