The scientist and scientific data

The statistic that 90% of scientists of all time are alive today has often been used for its shock value, but the same can be said of babies, of TV repairmen, and of newlyweds, a piece of data which alarms no one. The massive growth of the literature produced by this corps of scientists does present a problem—a real one for society but sometimes an illusory one for the individual scientist. The latter may undergo anxiety, not so much because of the two million scientific papers which appear annually but because his fraternal badge says “biochemist,” “pathologist,” or what you will, and this semantic tyranny demands reading a constant fraction of the swelling mass. What the scientist puts into the literature is different from what he wants back out of it. He must endow his published work with experimental reproducibility and add his interpretation as a very separate adjunct. In order to insure plausibility, the referee system of peer judgment is brought to bear on manuscripts. The scientist does not enjoy having his manuscript trimmed. What he prefers to take out of the literature is its quintessence, which has predictive value when applied to his own field of exploration. It is clear that an extensive job of adaptation is needed to reconcile input of raw material with output of knowledge potentially useful to society. Carrying the problem a step further, the conversion of that knowledge into applied technology requires a system for adaptation. It will be the task of the future to define fresh means to effect this conversion.