In Korea, there is a phrase that says “bear does the trick but human collects all the money,” which means someone does all the work while other takes the payment for the work unfairly. Unfortunately, this can be observed in three different time periods with respect to biological innovations when distribution of credit for biological innovations were affected by national interest or personal interest. Examples include: when the already existing West Indian balsam was first introduced to Spain, and Antonio de Villasante, instead of Santo Domingo natives, received the patent; when Rosalind Franklin didn’t receive the deserved credit for her contribution to the discovery of the double helix; and when Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s work on the CRISPR discovery was dismissed. Deserving people didn’t receive proper credit, a history which of course continues. This paper discusses those three examples of mis-allocation of credit using Robert Merton’s norms of science, that is, the four conditions — communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and open to criticism — for science to flourish. Robert Merton claims that good science needs to be shared by all, have no bias, have no exploitation for personal gain, and should be open to criticism.
When Spain set about imperial conquest, they faced a major problem: yellow fever. As “sugar came to tropical Atlantic America in 1640s,” the number of mosquitos which spread yellow fever also increased (McNeill). Furthermore, the disease “killed outsiders more easily than locals” (McNeill). Thus Spaniards who were exploring the New World needed a cure for this disease that killed so many of their soldiers weakened by the long voyage. As a result, Spaniards discovered Hispaniola balsam by asking “native inhabitants of the Santo Domingo port (the main port of entrance to the New World)” for a solution to this problem (Barrera 163). Balsam, a cure “to vision problems, to purge, to provoke menstruation and childbirth and also helped to heal wounds, to provoke urine, and to mitigate fatigue, was a good antidote against poison” (Barrera 165). For this life-saving discovery, some of Robert Merton’s norms were met while some weren’t. First of all, the discovery of balsam was not communal because Antonio de Villasante, husband of native chief Catalina de Ayahibex, “obtained from the crown the right to exploit balsam” and later was granted “a complete monopoly on the Santo Domingo balsam” (Barrera 170). This complete patent monopoly foreclosed an open sharing of the discovery, which of course makes sense because the discovery of balsam was entwined in the interests of the crown, the financial and political motives, and those of the church, too, because not only monarchies but also churches controlled land and commerce. While the scientific norms of communism and disinterestedness were not met, out of self-interest universalism was met in this case — a strategic universalism. Spaniards willingly accepted natives’ knowledge, including that of Villasante’s wife’s, to gain what they needed, a medicine they much desired. They did not question the natives because they benefited greatly from accepting their knowledge not only physically but also financially, exploiting their resources. However, the seeming panacea balsam started to get challenged by some experts, including the physician Licenciado Barreda in 1529. He questioned Villasante’s Santo Domingo balsam’s authenticity and effectiveness by claiming that “physicians in the Old World did not experience the New World” and Villasante “did not compare his liquor with the original, Old World balsam; he assumed that they were similar” (Barrera 171). Furthermore, Spanish physicians who supported balsam did not share their opinions or consult their learned and experienced counterparts in the New World. In other words, they were not open to criticism. The crown responded to this by sending out samples of balsam to multiple physicians and scientists so that they could experiment and then validate the effectiveness of balsam and accept criticism. Through such an act of seeking validation, the crown controlled the credit for this discovery and by granting Villasante patent monopoly, it oversaw its distribution. This distribution was affected by the crown’s national financial interest and also by curiosity about the New World. However it isn’t clear whether this discovery of balsam could meet Merton’s norms in general because the discovery isn’t pure science. Balsam had existed before Villasante introduced it to Spain. And the crown did not give a patent to natives for the drug, and instead gave the patent to Antonio de Villasante. Thus, in this case it is difficult to apply Merton’s norms, which were designated for pure science. After all, the situation is not so much one of discovery as appropriation. The Santo Domingo natives did not receive the credit they deserved because the Spanish crown was most interested in its own financial benefit. The interests of science and those of imperialism do not always line up (much like those of capitalism and science today).
Unlike that 16th-century example, a later example from the 20th century, the discovery of the Double Helix, shows how the distribution of credit for the work was greatly affected by personal misogynistic acts and selfish intellectual curiosity, rather than national interests. Composed of four different bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine — DNA had been a major interest in the world of science. Compared to protein, there wasn’t much known about DNA; thus, the discovery of its structure received much attention. People today well know who James Watson and Francis Crick are after the immense recognition they received when they first published a paper on the double-helix model structure of DNA in Nature magazine and when James Watson published his autobiography, The Double Helix. Even though The Double Helix instantly became a bestseller, the story he tells is questionable: was credit for the discovery fairly distributed? Mostly not. Like the balsam discovery, the discovery of the double helix did not completely meet the Merton’s norms. First, the discovery was not communal. Indeed, it was considered a secret — at least not until it was published and became available to the public — because there were multiple teams competing for this discovery, not only internationally but also nationally. Internationally, competition between teams in the United Kingdom and the United States got heated: Linus Pauling from the US competed against scientists from the UK to decipher the structure of DNA first. In the meantime, in the UK, there was also competition among teams in Cambridge, Oxford, and London. The discovery clearly was not free from disinterestedness, but in a different way from the balsam’s discovery because each team worked hard to find the structure before others and receive recognition for intellectual accomplishment rather than an attempt to colonize a people and place for national financial reasons. In order to beat their competitors, Watson and Crick attempted to expedite their search, and they succeeded only with the help of an uncredited scientist, Rosalind Franklin. The discovery was open to criticism since Watson and Crick attempted multiple times to explain the design of DNA, and sometimes their model got heavily criticized as an “embarrassing failure” and had to try other models (DNA The Secret of Photo 51). The reason Watson and Crick were able to redeem themselves from those failed models is because they used Rosalind Franklin’s data, yet Watson gave her no credit in his book. Historically, this was a time when female rights were not as strong as in now. In “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science,” Margaret Rossiter states that often women were not only “unrecognized in their own time and generally remained so, but others who were well-known in their day have since been obliterated from history, either by laziness or inertia, or by historians with definite axes to grind” (Rossiter 328). In a perfect example of that, after Rosalind Franklin had passed, James Watson published his autobiography depicting Franklin in such a wrongfully dismissive way. In the book, he argued that she was a bad team player and a feminist whose “best home was in someone else’s lab” (Watson 15). He also stated multiple times she was secretive and aggressive with belligerent moods and bad taste. However, multiple different sources, even Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, confirmed that Rosalind Franklin was in fact a social, fashionable, and “presentable person” (DNA The Secret of Photo 51). (Of course such a fixation on her appearance and demeanor is in itself wildly sexist, and certainly a poorly dressed, asocial male scientist would trouble no one.) Watson dismisses her further by introducing her as Maurice Wilkins’ assistant in the first chapter of his book; in fact, she considered herself as Wilkins’ colleague not assistant. Later when the discovery of double helix was awarded the Nobel Prize, only Wilkins, Watson, and Crick were awarded. Nobel prizes can only be received by three people or fewer and cannot be given to a dead person; however, those three did not even give her the credit she deserved for contributing “crystallographic measures of A and B form, and high-quality x-ray pictures” in their speech (lecture 15). Franklin’s work did not receive its credit because she was a female scientist at a time when “the more a woman worked the more the men around her profited and the less credit she got” (Rossiter 337). What is particularly troubling in this case, however, is that Franklin was not merely invisible to her male colleagues, they actively repudiated — and indeed vilified — her.
More recently, the discovery of CRISPR, the “gene editing” technique invented in 2013 and which blasted onto the science pages this year” showed yet another example of women not receiving they deserved credit (Comfort). Ever since humans have been cultivating food through agriculture, “they have aimed to identify and incorporate beneficial traits (higher yields, for example, or disease resistance) into existing plant varieties” (qtd. in Montañez). This even goes back to Gregor Mendel’s pea experiment when he bred and manipulated certain peas to get the results he desired. Nowadays, scientists use precise techniques like CRISPR “to mutate specific genes or insert new genetic traits with unprecedented precision” (qtd. in Montañez). The technique speeds up and makes gene modifying much more precise by targeting “a specific gene and either deactivate or replace it” (qtd. in Montañez). Although this new technology seems entirely positive because altered genes would make possible all kinds of improvements in health and agriculture, some people argue that gene editing is unethical and might result in unexpected negatives not only in health but also in the environment. They argue that no one knows the long-term effects of such modified food, and people should be cautious about consuming it. And furthermore gene editing will worsen “capital intensive agribusiness” and bankrupt small farms. On the other hand, others argue that such innovation will make agriculture better because there will be “less pesticide and herbicide use” (Lecture 18). Both sides’ arguments are valid and thus the debate continues. With such promise and controversy, naturally CRISPR has received much attention. Interestingly, this biological innovation was the result of a competition. In 2014, “the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT was awarded the first patent for CRISPR technology” while another team of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier had submitted “their own application seven months earlier” but in slower-track approval (Comfort). This patent made the discovery neither communal nor disinterested because those two teams competed for the patent, making it clear that they wanted to achieve personal gain, winning the competition, through this innovation. Nevertheless, the aspect most contradictory to Merton’s norms is universalism; this can be seen through Eric Lander’s commentary Cell. Lander “minimizes Doudna’s contributions to CRISPR and thus his piece “serves as a propaganda organ on behalf of the Broad’s claim to the patent rights” (qtd. in Comfort). Doudna and Charpentier unfortunately lost their patent to the technique because Broad received fast-track approval, and public relations that dismiss others’ contribution. Lander, in his piece, gives enough credit to certain male contributors, the Broad institute's scientists, even calling them “heroes,” mentioning early in the paper Francisco Mojica, an initial scientist who paved the way for CRISPR discovery, and the Lithuanian scientist Virginijus Siksnys by mentioning his name in first line of two paragraphs. However “Charpentier’s name appears at the bottom of a paragraph” and Doudna’s name “is buried in the middle of a paragraph” (Comfort). This is because, even though much better than in earlier times, we still live in a society with the unfair gender dynamics. “‘History by the winners’ still tends to end up being ‘history by the men’” (Comfort). It is likely that Doudna and Carpentier did not have received the credit they deserve in Lander’s commentary in part because as women they are not seen by men as important as the men mentioned in his article, and perhaps the Broad Institute wanted to make sure the credit was all theirs, and so encouraged Lander to write a piece diminishing the roles of Doudna and Carpentier. However, the winners’ discovery wouldn’t have happened same way if they hadn’t competed against Doudna and Carpentier since “science is no longer done in monasteries. Competition, pride, ego, greed, and politics play all too great a role in determining who gets credit” (Comfort).
Whether because of overt financial self-interest or intellectual acclaim, scientists can’t help being fallible; they are, after all, people. And yet that as an explanation by no means justifies taking undue credit for a discovery or failing to acknowledge the significant contributions of others to it. The standards scientists hold themselves to — much as doctors do in their field — are not abstract ideals but actual standards that should inform their practice. Theft and duplicity are in no way excusable.