Sunday, December 18, 2011

Flirting with Oblivion



K., my host, had a timid smile that didn’t yield even the slightest hint to the news she was going to break. “Looking for your publication record in PubMed”, she said while we were crossing the spacious cafeteria of the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, “I noticed a gap of about thirty years. You must have done other things then?”

Well, I did do many other things in those years, but the major one was pursuing my research interests. This unavoidably culminated in many papers, some of which I admittedly still feel much attached to. What K. implied was, however, that no trace could be found of these papers in the major data base in my field. A gloomy, existential uneasiness descended on me. I was supposed to start delivering the Max Birnstiel Lecture at IMP within half an hour, yet decided that there was still enough time to conduct an independent experiment. I woke my MacBook Air from its electronic sleep, connected to the internet, and lo and behold, the bare truth shone on the glossy screen: PubMed indeed displayed only a single reference of one of my earliest papers, not necessarily the one to write home about, then only a few from the last few years. The rest were gone, although they were there a few weeks earlier when I needed to consult the site. I did the expected control experiment and typed a colleague’s name in the search line. His entire list of publications came up proudly in no time. I tried mine again. No remedy. Nada. Gornisht mit gornisht. The public track record of my academic career seemed to have suddenly descended into oblivion.

Scientific careers are not unlike the names of T.S. Elliot’s cats: they come in three versions. First, there is the private version, known only to oneself, reconstructed and sometimes naturally self-inflated as years go by, an associative autobiographical web of episodic and semantic information unavailable to those not personally involved. Second, there is the version known to colleagues, containing elements of shared experiences and interests and discussions and colored by context, anecdotes, and personal touch. And finally, there is the public version, which whoever wanders into the literature encounters. Nowadays, the information for this public profile is retrieved from the web, and data bases are the major source. In science as in science, scribo ergo sum, but whether you did publish or not, is disclosed by the search function of the data bases. Hence when our records disappear from these data bases, we take a step toward oblivion in the scientific universe.

Later at night, scenarios were alternating in my head. Some were straightforward, like whom should I actually contact to find out what happened and make sure my record is restored. Some were admittedly paranoiac. Was it personal, or did I stumble across a plot by Dr. No to slowly annihilate world science? Or, may be, this could have been expected, since I didn’t listen to smart advice years earlier. When I first met my postdoctoral mentor, Seymour Benzer, in Caltech, he had two statements to make to the newcomer. One was that being trained in Biophysics, I should pay attention to the fact that animals behave, and therefore should not rush to grind them up. This one I followed. The second, that I have already published too much at that early stage in my career, and I should not continue cranking papers at such pace. This one I am not sure I did follow. Was this the belated punishment?

I woke up still engulfed by the sense of the frailty of the human condition. Luckily, PubMed’s fair treatment of my scientific output returned to normal within less than a day. Possibly, some merry electrons in a remote server regained their senses and decided to restore world order. Hence my mini-encounter with oblivion was so far only a brief flirt, possibly even gone unnoticed except by K. and me. Yet I came to cherish hardcopies again, and I may even pay a visit to a real library just to pay tribute to the printed word. Coming to think about it, evolution has probably embedded in us the reliance on tangibility, the need to palpate things before we really trust in them. I plan to print out all my papers and bind them, just in case. It may be difficult to place so much faith in clouds.

© Yadin Dudai 2011