“The first step [of experimentation] is observation, not a hypothesis”, Gusella said. The scientific community has been so focused on having a hypothesis, he said, that getting funding without one was almost impossible because research projects that appeared purely descriptive (that is, projects that seemed to merely describe a phenomenon rather than answer a research question) were rarely awarded grants in the recent past. The scientific establishment’s penchant for storytelling may still prompt some researchers to formulate questions that they already know the answers to (“I can map and clone this gene”, for instance) simply to get funding for experimental research that may inhibit the careful observation necessary to formulate a meaningful hypothesis.
“Unfortunately”, said Gusella, “scientists must tailor their results to fit a hypothesis, which then must fit the overarching story that the research community is trying to tell.” This need for storytelling often results in unnecessary hype over a “rediscovered” discovery. For example, Alzheimer’s researchers have presented the same or similar findings about amyloid plaques over and over again, and the scientific community treats these findings as new discoveries. The way MacDonald views it, “It’s like mentioning Wilt Chamberlain to today’s great basketball players, and they say, ’Who?’”
Gusella and MacDonald think of science as a field in which researchers must continually build on the past, or else they run the risk of repeating the past (as in the Alzheimer’s example) or even losing it (as in the Wilt Chamberlain example). Gusella, though, cited an example of a scientific endeavor that did not have a hypothesis but was ultimately successful - the Human Genome Project, a thirteen-year effort coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health to determine the complete sequence of the DNA in the human genome. The project gathered genetic information and developed a hypothesis later. Thankfully, said Gusella, the scientific community is beginning to come around; nowadays, more value is placed on descriptive research.
“Regardless of the type of research one is doing,” Gusella concluded, “the results can be interpreted in various ways, but one must select the correct interpretation.” Scientists must be willing to rule out certain hypotheses, as well as present failed hypotheses to their peers and to the public. Negative results are just as important as positive results because the data from a failed experiment may be useful in future research.
Last Modified: 05/22/2009
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