My research began as a browsing of letters and laboratory notes on the Rockefeller University archives, and later expanded to include study of the materials housed at Yale, Johns Hopikns, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, as well as conversations with members of Kleiner’s family. I published an earlier consideration of the scientific aspects of Kleiner’s story in Nature Medicine, a medical journal, in 2010.COMMENT
This description of the research process is given in a footnote. Perhaps Friedman is used to writing for journals and couldn’t bear to leave out the citations for a popular magazine. Or maybe he just found digging around in the archives to be such an interesting and delightful passtime that he wanted to tell us about it.
The article is about an obscure researcher named Israel Kleiner who almost discovered a cure for diabetes (the people who eventually did won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1923). Friedman writes, “I immediately wanted to know more about Kleiner and his story especially given my own interest in hormone research.”
The research problem— Kleiner was not at all famous. He worked alone in his lab. His few published journal articles, including one “masterpiece,” were written without co-authors. He later became a college administrator. What documentation of his life existed was in records from the places he had worked and in the memory of people who knew him.
What Friedman discovered in the archives is a kind of bureaucratic tragedy. Even though Kleiner was on the verge of a major breakthrough, the director of the Rockefeller Institute fired him because he thought infectious disease research was more important than diabetes research. After all, in the era before antibiotics soldiers died from infections, not from diabetes. (There may also have been anti-Semitism going on). Friedmam thinks the director lost sight of the value of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. He writes, “scientific inquiry is an arc of knowledge, a series of steps on a path toward a deeper understanding of the unknown, and the breakthroughs only come because of the body of knowledge that previous observations have built.” Libraries store this body of knowledge in the form of scholarly journals.
All these years later, Friedman feels a sense of outrage on behalf of Kleiner. He writes, “I can say with certainty that under similar circumstances neither I nor most other ambitious scientist I know would have maintained Kleiner’s apparent sense of equanimity about his missed opportunity.” And yet it is still true that researchers can only do their work if they have funding and lab space. No matter how objective science is, money is always political, and that means so is missing information in the scientific record.
All these years later, Friedman feels a sense of outrage on behalf of Kleiner. He writes, “I can say with certainty that under similar circumstances neither I nor most other ambitious scientist I know would have maintained Kleiner’s apparent sense of equanimity about his missed opportunity.” And yet it is still true that researchers can only do their work if they have funding and lab space. No matter how objective science is, money is always political, and that means so is missing information in the scientific record.
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