The seven deadly curs'd sins … Pride

I received your package last Monday and have spent the week reading its contents. You have no idea of how grateful I am to have something to do these days. The experiments validating your new theory of olfaction are most ingenious. Then I read the letter from the editor of Smell and the referees' comments enclosed. You can safely ignore the editor who has clearly not read the paper. The first referee can also be set aside as all of his comments came straight out of a word processor. However, the second referee, who seems to have angered you most, should be taken more seriously. I know that you are proud of your work but, like most things, pride has two faces: true and false, honest and misapplied. When it is based on real quality and attainment it is a virtue, but when the self esteem is overdone it is a vice. It is not impossible that a referee has seen something you have not seen, knows something unknown to you or, by sheer chance, has found some gap in your argument. You should therefore go and do the added control, if only to prove him wrong. I remember reviewing a paper in which the authors proudly claimed to have rescued galactokinase-negative mutant human cells with DNA from a lambda bacteriophage carrying the galactose operon ofE. coli. The control was a normal lambda. I just did not believe the result and I suggested doing the same experiment with a nonsense mutation in the galactokinase gene. This is a text book control experiment because the two phages would differ only in one base pair. The authors' reply was that they saw no point in doing this control because it was bound not to work. Today, of course, we know that the original result is totally implausible. The authors were either misled by an artefact-perhaps carried over enzyme from t~e lysed bacteria-or this was a case of applying the UNF (universal normalizing factor), which is to multiply the experimental result by the ratio of the theoretical to the experimental result. The episode I want to recount now is much more instructive. In 1960, I attended a seminar by a scientist, G (because some of the people are still alive I shall not disclose their names), who announced with great pride the result of an experiment which he believed showed that bacteriophages with …