Science as Humanity
melanie jones interviews deborah blum
No one can accuse Deborah Blum of being an underachiever. She is an environmental psychologist whose articles on animal testing, compiled in The Monkey Wars, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and her follow-up biography of psychologist Harry Harlow, Love at Goon Park, was named Best Book of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly, Discover Magazine, and Library Journal. As a professor of journalism and mass communication at UW-Madison, Blum has served on numerous advisory committees in the science community and been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, and Rolling Stone. Her most recent book, Ghost Hunters, chronicles William James’ investigations of paranormal activity. Melanie Jones talked with professor Blum about balancing science with the humanities, journalism with teaching, and criticism with praise.
Your father, Murray Blum, was an entomologist, and your mother a writer. Did you grow up with a pretty equal respect for the humanities and sciences? What did your parents think of your decision early on to be an environmental journalist?
I’m definitely a hybrid. My dad wanted us (I have three younger sisters) to grow up loving the natural world. We had snakes for pets, jars of tadpoles on the breakfast table so we could watch them become frogs, and once—when he was studying poisonous spiders—a black widow in a plexiglass box as the centerpiece in our dining room tables. My mother “published” a family newspaper for us to write in and religiously took us to the library every week. As for my choice to become an environmental journalist, candidly, my mother was fine with it as long as I was really good at it. Pretty much a childhood mantra. My dad was initially horrified—he came of that generation of scientists who thought that real scientists didn’t appear in newspapers—but I’ve pretty much won him over on that.
Your biographies and research articles are accessible in a way that reaches scientists and nonscientists alike. Do you keep a larger audience in mind when you write? Are specific books more aimed toward enlightening the general public or opening the minds of your colleagues?
Well, I’ve never been entirely interested in preaching to the choir. So I always try to write in a way that will (or so I dream) make people who don’t like science become seduced into it, get caught up in how human the enterprise is and how useful it is to our understanding of how we are. I assume that everyone I write for, scientist or not, is smart enough to get my drift. It’s more fun to write that way anyway. I recognize that a lot of scientists read my books, of course, and some of the books, like Love at Goon Park, regularly turn up in psychology classes. So that drives my obsessive-compulsive need to be right about things, which is a fairly healthy approach for a science writer.
With Love at Goon Park, which is both about a very unusual psychologist and about the science of love and affection, I really had a larger audience in mind. I wanted readers to realize the ways that science helps illuminate our relationships—and also the fundamental bedrock importance of those relationships. With Ghost Hunters, yeah, I partly wrote that with the scientific community in mind, with the idea of kind of stirring things up, making the point that there’s a kind of arrogance in insisting that one species, on one small planet in a corner of the universe, knows it all. Plus I liked some of the beautifully strange experiences that the Victorian ghost hunters tried to unravel.
You say in Ghost Hunters that it was “past time … for science to open its mind.” Do you feel that science has become more flexible over time in accepting and examining alternate theories?
You’re absolutely right. I do like risk-takers in science. I admire the courage it takes to resolutely push an idea despite the enormous antipathy of colleagues. I like exploring the ways that ideas in science arise and evolve. Harry Harlow was a mixed story, of course, but he was very successful in helping to drive the acceptance in psychology that love and affection are important. James was brilliant, internationally renowned for almost all his work, except the psychical research. So I was very intrigued by the reasons that he never gave up on it. Obviously, James and his colleagues never succeeded in making their psychical research mainstream. But they built a framework that still supports the paranormal work, whether you like it or not, that does endure. And they did of a great job of suggesting that we just have our definitions wrong—that “supernatural” may just be another name for the natural world that we’ve yet to understand.
As to flexibility, I think science is mostly inflexible. As an institution, it holds onto ideas until they self-destruct or some courageous scientist blows them up. The theory of plate tectonics is a famous example of a scientist whose career was almost destroyed because he was absolutely right about an alternative model. And that hasn’t really changed—funding encourages researchers to play it safe. But—to be incurably fair about this—one of the reasons the scientific system works, has produced such amazing results, is because it does adhere to very set demands, principles of evidence, and though that does sometimes make it difficult to work on innovative ideas it also prevents people wasting too much time on silly ones.
Your Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Monkey Wars, examines both sides of the animal rights issue, and Ghost Hunters is similarly balanced between arguments for and against analysis of paranormal activity. After so much research on both sides, do you find your position on the issue has shifted or that it’s difficult to have a definitive opinion at all?
When I wrote Monkey Wars, I had a couple of very clear objectives in mind. I wanted to explore the inherent ethical dilemma of doing research on closely-related species. Animal research is about us: number one species on the planet. We can do anything we want to these animals so the decisions we make in studying them are revealing about us as well as them. I wanted to illuminate what the research was, how it worked. And I wanted to allow voices on both sides of the issue to be heard. What’s dismaying to me is those positions, on both sides of the issue, have moved so little in the years since I wrote the book. Scientists seem even more secretive about their work, activists even more angry. So… opinionated? More than I used to be. Sometimes I just want to knock everyone’s heads together and say: “Why don’t you set the theatrics aside for a while and at least try to collaborate on making sure that animals in research labs are always treated with respect?”
Your books often incorporate social criticism into their examination of various scientific movements or stances. Is there any way to put scientific research, especially psychology research, in a bubble?
That’s a great and even tricky question. Ideally, research itself is done in an objective way, not trying to load the data, or manipulate the results for a desired end. No surprise there. But obviously, particularly in the social sciences, questions may be asked in a cultural framework. And sometimes should. The tricky part—and this is true with all sciences—is when the results raise a social or moral question. Such as with Harlow’s work: what if it was absolutely true that you could only get the answer by isolating or terrifying small monkeys? How much are you willing to pay for knowledge? What lines should a scientist refuse to cross? Or are there any? I think there are. And I think it’s important for such questions to be asked and important for science—as a human enterprise—to consider the implications of such research. \\\