Relying on Intuition

By DAVID MOGOLOV

INTUITION
By Allegra Goodman
352 pages. Dial Press. $25.00

In 2005, John Brockman, the gadfly at Edge.org, asked over 100 scientists and philosophers, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” The answers ranged from the fascinating to the banal. He didn’t ask Allegra Goodman, but if he had, Intuition might have been her answer, and it would have been a good one.

As the title suggest, Goodman’s new novel explores the headspace that precedes certainty: the bullish confidence that demands proof. She’s found fertile ground for an exploration of scientific character and human nature.

Without some measure of intuition to guide them, scientists would be working with little more advantage than brute force provides, running experiments in endless permutations until luck delivered a discovery. Over years of experience and careful observation, a good scientist might intuit the most fruitful paths to discovery, and spend her scant research money wisely. But intuition, a personal, prideful thing, includes hope of being right. In that hope is the seed of personal ambition that is anathema to the properly applied scientific method.

That seed, and others, are planted early. As in her National Book Award-nominated Kaaterskill Falls, Goodman has created and presented her characters with artistry. Set loose, they go where they would, given who they are. Their habits, anxieties, and ambitions are the perfect predictors of the course their lives will take. For all the uncertainty she depicts in scientific research, she seems certain of one aspect of the lab: the character of the researchers will determine the outcome of their work as surely as the experiments will.

At the center of her story are two postdoctoral scientists at the acclaimed but financially strapped Philpott Institute, a biological research center loosely affiliated with Harvard. Cliff Bannaker, once a rising star, has spent almost three years running entirely unsuccessful trials of a viral cancer treatment called RSV. The directors of the research lab have ordered him off his research, but secretly, he’s persisted. Robin Decker, in her sixth year at the Philpott, has yet to find success in picking up her boss’ research work, and is hoping to start her own research project, looking at bone-tumor growth. She’s been secretly dating Cliff for some time.

When another postdoc observes that one variant of RSV, R-7, has miraculously cured several mice of their tumors, Cliff’s work is suddenly the most important project the laboratory has ever seen. The directors of Cliff and Robin’s laboratory at the Philpott, Sandy Glass and Marion Mendelssohn, are at odds over how to proceed, and, more importantly, how to publicize the discovery. Sandy, a star oncologist, glad-hander, and showboat, wants to announce the preliminary results as quickly and loudly as possible. Marion, the careful researcher, knows that such results require confirmation and skeptical challenging, and convinces him to relent, though not much. As soon as the results are partially confirmed in a second experiment, Sandy notifies both the popular and scientific press, applies for a grant from the NIH, and presses his bosses at the Philpott for more resources and more freedom.

With that freedom—freedom to pour money into R-7 research, freedom to write a flashy paper on the virus for Nature, freedom to bring the media into the lab, and freedom to put all of their research efforts into a single project—the character of each scientist is set loose. In Glass’ case, one aspect of his freedom is the quashing of dissent. Robin Decker, well before the paper was published, and just after a traumatic romantic breakup with Cliff, had come forward with allegations that his research was either sloppy or fraudulent. Glass won’t hear of it, and, against her better judgment, Marion lowers her defenses. Robin’s concerns are given little attention, and she eventually leaves the lab and makes her allegations public.

At risk are the reputations and ambitions of at least four scientists, and the outcome is dependent on whose intuition proves the most accurate: Cliff’s, that his years of RSV research were not spent in vain; Sandy’s, that the results show a bona fide scientific breakthrough; Marion’s, that whatever doubts may exist about Cliff’s work habits, the research of her lab is rigorous and her postdocs are trustworthy; or Robin’s, that Cliff’s ambition is more powerful than his dedication to legitimate scientific methods. “On the ground, in the lab, intuition was a restricted substance,” Goodman writes. “Like imagination and emotion, intuition misled researchers, leading them to willful interpretations.” Goodman’s greatest accomplishment in Intuition is in creating characters so complete, so believable, and starting them down a road in which they cannot possibly all be acting in good faith, despite their plausible claims to it.

Those claims are all tested, among one another, in the press, in front of a grandstanding Congressman, and ultimately in the laboratories and journals of their peers. Their scholarly, religious, and social beliefs are tested, and in the end, Allegra Goodman provides an answer that would have been among the Edge’s best. You can’t prove that any method is flawless, but her belief that open inquiry and impersonal application of the scientific process will always separate the true from the false is one that animates the entire scientific community, whether they examine it or not.