Customer Reviews

Intuition

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

"Intuition" is science as observed by Jane Austen rather than Michael Crichton. I was mesmerized from page one and cried when I reached the gentle revelation of the last scene. Science has long deserved a literary treatment by a great novelist and Allegra Goodman delivers with her carefully-examined microcosm.

The novel is a character study rather than a whodunit, or more precisely, whodonewhat. The central plot of alleged fraud in the lab provides the dissecting knife to tease apart the complicated relationships among the lab mentors and serfs--postdoctoral researchers and technicians. Goodman absolutely nails the depiction of the claustrophobic, almost cloistered ambience and power structures of a high-powered research institute. She treats all of her characters with fairness and honesty, which is the key to the novel's success. I myself was a neuroscience graduate student at Stanford. Reading "Inutition" brought back those days, adding the gifts of compassion and universal perspective to my hindsight view of many challenging years of study.

"Intuition" is an old-fashioned novel, and I am interested to know if that is why Allegra Goodman chose to set the story in the late 1980's (1987 is my best guess). This was a technologically simpler era of cell biology, the moment just before molecular biology and gene cloning took off. The particular science performed in "Intuition" is secondary. There are no whiz-bang scenes of technological madness. That's the brilliance of the novel: distilling scientific ambition, reward, disappointment and betrayal down to its human essence. "Intuition" is the rare book that will be enjoyed by lab geeks and English lit majors alike.

A young scientist, searching for a virus-based cancer cure in an independent, Cambridge area research institute is being pressured to abandon his so far unfruitful work. Suddenly, sixty percent of his tumor-ridden experimental mice begin showing signs of remission from a modified virus labeled R-7. Has he discovered a cancer cure, or has he doctored his data in order to garner the professional and monetary glories of great scientific discovery?

Allegra Goodman's latest novel, INTUITION, begins as a seemingly earnest examination of life in the world of modern scientific research. She populates her novel with a full panoply of scientific archetypes: the glad-handing, self-promoting head of the institute (Sandy Glass), his more introverted and self-doubting partner Marion Mendelssohn, their respective intellectual but self-sacrificing spouses and overachieving superchildren, and a striving, United Nations collection of young researchers, assistants, and lab techs: Cliff, Robin, Natalya, Prithwish, Feng, Nanette, Akira, and later Mir and Miki. Cliff's sudden breakthrough with R-7 rocks the institute and diverts the lab's full resources and attention to further investigation. All other projects are put on hold, much to the dislike of the eager-to-achieve Robin who also happens to have a somewhat on-again, off-again relationship with Cliff. Plans are made for public announcement, research papers, new NIH research grants until Robin begins having trouble replicating Cliff's results.

For the first half to two-thirds of the book, Ms. Goodman gives us a behind-the-scenes look at an all-too-human group of scientists. Perhaps unexpectedly to some, they experience the same boredoms, frustrations, inside jokes and teasings, petty jealousies, administrative overload, and interpersonal conflicts that you could find in any corporate office or large institution. And then Robin takes her doubts public, and what seemed like a quiet examination of research life, its alternating waves of self-doubt, exhileration, and ennui, and even the very question of what constitutes results and proof gets turned on its head. INTUITION becomes the science institute equivalent of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.

In the last third of INTUITION, Ms. Goodman introduces the outside world. The media arrive, represented most sarcastically by People Magazine, looking not for the facts or the truth but simply a marketable story (instead of writing about Cliff, they settle on Feng as their human interest poster boy, their token immigrant struggling against all odds to achieve the American dream). Politicians arrive, represented by a pompous, thinly-disguised, anti-science neoconservative who hopes to use a case of reputed scientific fraud as an excuse to cut NIH's budget. Lawyers arrive, ready to trash people's personal lives to prove their cases. All are caricatures, satirical satellites revolving around the scientific firmament. Yet as the Institute and its researchers are engulfed by the swirl of outside events and interests, Ms. Goodman's carefully cultivated mix of characters and personalities suddenly feel like stereotypes and caricatures themselves. Cliff seems increasingly shallow and single-minded, Robin appears naïve and whiny to the point of being utterly unlikable, Sandy comes across as a money-grubbing opportunist who spouts idealistic phrases just for the way they sound, and Marion crawls further into her shell, plagued by fears of personal inadequacy.

My initial reaction to this change of atmosphere was negative, as if the novel had gone off course and turned into a mock version of one of Tom Wolfe's. With further reflection, however, I realized that Ms. Goodman had attempted, and I think achieved, an interesting literary effect. As the events inspired by Robin's doubts, jealousies, and petty vengefulness spin out of control, the closed world of the Institute's laboratories is exposed to the outside world. Her characters, accustomed to isolated, carefully measured, eighteen-hour days working, interacting, and even rooming with one another, are suddenly faced by a different world, one of which they are barely aware after years of college, graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral ivory tower work. It is as if they had been in a dark closet for ten or fifteen years and someone had just opened the door to let in the light. They are mentally and behaviorally unprepared to deal with this strange environment that impinges - indeed, thrusts itself - into their world. As a result, they come across as stereotypes to these outside forces, and those same forces appear to them as caricatures. These outsiders are superficial beings interested only in money or notoriety, for whom truth is only relative at best and irrelevant at worst.

With INTUITION, Allegra Goodman has crafted an entertaining and highly readable story that peeks behind the Wizard's curtain at the mundane, day-to-day race for scientific breakthroughs. The next big discovery, the Nobel-winning result with its attendant fame and fortune, lies around the corner, just out of sight. In the meantime, even the best researchers have to deal with the trials and tribulations of everyday life and the constant fear of misdirected effort, wasted time, lost opportunity, not being first, or just not being good enough. In Ms. Goodman's literary realm, scientists are people, too. Their work is far less sterile, and far more prone to human failings and urges, than most of us imagine. The evidence of flawed research and doctored results is there for us to see (and has been for centuries), yet we are still surprised at every new revelation of scientific fraud that hits the newspapers. Ms. Goodman's INTUITION demonstrates why we shouldn't be so shocked.

In a world of few certainties, should we let intuition be our guide? Equally, how much faith should we place in the hands of others, even those we think we know the best? These are the intriguing questions driving Allegra Goodman's thought-provoking new novel exploring the human side of the high-stakes world of experimental research. Exchanging the close-knit Jewish community of her National Book Award-nominated KAATERSKILL FALLS for the collegially cutthroat scientific community, Goodman shifts her focus from religious and spiritual issues to exploring faith of a different kind --- faith in others, faith in ourselves, and most of all, faith in moral certitude.

Just as the protagonist in Goodman's previous novel PARADISE PARK was obsessed by a quest for spiritual truth, INTUITION's single-minded cancer researcher Robin Drecker becomes obsessed with seeking truth of the scientific and moral kind at the prestigious Philpott Institute where she works alongside her self-assured boyfriend Cliff. Hungry for grant money --- and therefore in desperate need of results --- their small Cambridge research lab is quick to jump on the groundbreaking new findings demonstrated by Cliff's experiments with a promising viral strain that seems to bring about remission in cancerous tumors.

Lab co-director Sandy Glass, a brash oncologist and "evangelist of the most remarkable sort," insists on plunging ahead to herald the discovery with great public fanfare while his more circumspect partner, the rigorous and no-nonsense scientist Marion Mendelssohn, advocates a more cautious approach pending further experimentation. But Glass's contagious enthusiasm and relentless persistence eventually wins out, and the scientific world is set ablaze with news of the stunning breakthrough.

Meanwhile, Robin's instincts lead her to question Cliff's sensational results and make a disquieting discovery, but her concerns are summarily dismissed by Mendelssohn as little more than professional jealousy. With no outlet for her increasing uneasiness as she becomes ostracized from a scientific community that sticks together at all costs, her initial whispers of doubt blow into a force so destructive that it threatens to flatten everyone in its path --- including Robin herself.

As the story unfolds from four contrasting yet equally sympathetic points of view, the shifting narration continually casts doubt on what the "truth" really is, building up to an agonizing crescendo of suspense. The cut-and-dried world of science was never so ambiguously enthralling, a feat Goodman manages to accomplish by breaking down the field's impersonal facade to reveal the human side lurking underneath. With remarkable acuity, she illuminates the intricate, behind-the-scenes pressures and protocols involved in the high-stakes world of scientific research, portraying to powerful effect the often insidious --- and unavoidable --- influences of money, politics and power.

Against this weighty backdrop, Goodman brings to vivid life the individual struggles, triumphs and disappointments of her characters who, despite being held to different standards as scientists, are fallible human beings trying to make the best decisions they can given the circumstances they are faced with. Just like anyone else, they are capable of rushing to judgment when their objectivity becomes clouded by personal agendas and external forces.

Nowhere does Goodman render this particular human frailty more poignantly than in the compelling bond she creates between lab directors Marion Mendelssohn and Sandy Glass. The two larger-than-life beacons of scientific reasoning are a fascinating study in contrasts who share an unusually strong platonic attachment based on mutual admiration and fierce loyalty --- in spite of, or perhaps because of, their stark personal differences. Their strengths and weaknesses seem to complement and complete each other, at least until the controversy over Cliff's work engulfs their lab and Marion slowly realizes that she may have put too much faith in Sandy and not enough in herself. Conversely, Sandy experiences a lesson in humility by learning to accept his own limitations and put faith in things that are beyond his power.

A novel about science with heart, INTUITION illustrates the ways that even incontrovertible facts can be plagued by ambiguity. With penetrating insight into the human soul, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that any truth --- whether derived from intuition, reason, or empirical evidence --- is meaningless until we're ready to be true to ourselves.

--- Reviewed by Joni Rendon

I agree with the many other reviewers that Allegra Goodman's book distills down the ambition, pettiness, and ego of scientists to their barest human essentials. She breathes a considerable life and complexity into her characters and she interweaves their very different viewpoints and perspectives into a single narrative with a deft touch that makes spellbinding what could easily have been muddled.

Why then do I only give this book one star? Because a substantially identical story has been told better (and earlier!) by the writer Daniel J. Kevles in his book "The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character". Kevles is no novelist, though, he's an investigator. His story is true -- it actually happened. The Baltimore Case is the true story of allegations of research fraud that unfolded in Cambridge in the late 1980s. Ms. Goodman had the deck stacked in her favor when she set out to write this book: the characters and narrative were already in place!

Like Goodman's novel, the real, non-fictional Baltimore case involves
i) a widely known scientific figure (David Baltimore in real life; Sandy Glass in the novel); who collaborates with

ii) a lesser known ambitious junior colleague (Thereza Imanishi-Kari, junior to David Baltimore in years and in stature in real life; Marion Mendelsson, junior to Sandy in stature in the novel).

This research team
iii) works in the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts at a famous research institution in the 1980s (MIT's Center for Cancer Research in real life, a fictionlized "Philpott Institute" in the novel)

iv) and supervise a biomedical research project whose results are a called into question by female post-doctoral researcher in her mid-thirties (Margot O'Toole in real life; Robin in the novel) and

v) eventually becomes involved with a couple of hacks at the NIH (the Office of Scientific Integrity's Walter W. Stewart and Ned Feder in real life; the "Office for Research Integrity in Science"'s Alan Hackett and Jonathan Schneiderman in the novel) whose office is supposedly charged with investigating and quelling scientific fraud but

vi) really seems to focus on railroading people whether guilty or not, so that an aged, grandstanding congressman (John Dingell in real life; Paul Redfield in the novel) can generate some good PR.

Like the novel, a turning point in the Baltimore case is
vii) a forceful counterattack by the lead male researcher [Baltimore / Glass] to being badgered by the congressman [Dingell / Redfield] in a public hearing; after the turning point,

viii) there are a few ups and downs as OSI / ORIS office leaks documents to the press, but ultimately,

ix) a specially convened appeals panel exonerates all the researchers accused of fraud.

To believe that these nine examples of overlap between the novel and real life events are merely coincidental strains credulity. Nevertheless, the front matter to the novel contains the standard disclaimer that all resemblance to real people is "entirely coincidental".

From my perspective, the continuance of Ms. Goodman and her publisher to purport that the work is fictional is highly misleading to readers, at best. Although I detailed nine instance of suspicious overlap between the novel and real-life events, the similarity of Robin to Margot O'Toole, in personality as well as function in the plot (as described by Kevles in his book) is especially undeniable.

This book is like an inverse of "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey. Frey claimed he was writing about real events when actually he made them up. Oprah got mad. Well, her, Goodman claims to have made up this story when in fact has actually occurred. If only Oprah would step in here!

But even notwithstanding the fact that the "novel" actually isn't quite so, Daniel Kevles's book is more compelling, more detailed, and better written than Allegra Goodman's.

Don't want to read Kevles's book? That's ok, a cursory search of amazon revealed several other openly non-fictional books about the Baltimore case. Aside from this novel, which is purportedly not based on real-world people or events, Kevles' book is the only I have personally have read, and I enjoyed his book considerably.

In this book, Goodman continues to explore the themes introduced in her first novel Kaaterskill Falls. Both books are set in closed societies that demand total dedication and immersion by their members, and where personal ambition is expected to give way to the service of a higher calling. In the Orthodox Jewish sect at the heart of Kaaterskill Falls, the adherents are seeking closeness with God; in this book, the "higher calling" is the search for scientific truth. Here, Goodman deftly describes the claustrophobic world of the lab, in which the complex relationships among the inhabitants are much more tenuous and fragile than they seem. The delicate balance of this cloistered world remains intact until the researchers come tantalizingly close to greatness, when internal and external pressures blow everything apart.

Although there is much to admire in this book, somehow, for me, it does not live up to its promise. The characters never really come alive for me; they seem to have been created more to serve the Big Ideas at the core of the work instead of being fully formed individuals. And the plot, while clever, is highly schematic and very tightly controlled. It's sort of ironic that Goodman's primary theme -- that the search for purity and perfection cannot survive the messiness of human emotion -- is undermined to some extent by her own need for control.

Goodman's new book examines the relationships between a group of scientists working at a research lab. This institute, a thinly disguised version of the Whitehead in Cambridge, Mass, harbors people working in pursuit of grant dollars, the big discovery, fame, support, or enough money to pay for music seminars. Goodman convincingly illustrates life among the scientists, their post-docs and lab techs, plus their families.

What I enjoyed most about the book was Goodman's ability to take all these very different personalities and yet have the reader keep sympathy for just about everyone. From the precocious genius who decided to just back off and enjoy himself, to the larger-than-life partner who prefers writing grants to doing research, to the golden boy accused of research fraud, to the ex-girlfriend doing the accusing, the resentful specialist and the bitter outcast from the lab, all the characters remained fully drawn out. And Good man also succeeds in making these overcomepetent achievers have the same personal problems we all do, and thus making them sympathetic rather than callow or irrelevent.

The later section of the book did not quite fit with the rest of the work. At this point events spun completely out of control due to political intervention, and seemed more like something in a John Grisham novel than the deliberate thoughtfulness Goodman used throughout the rest of the book. Other than the oddity of the pacing toward the end, the book held together well and I finished wanting to know more about the characters and how everyone fared with their decisions.

The best thing about this book is not the science but the way in which Goodman portrays the human relationships within the laboratory. I've written about and read about whistleblowers in real life, and Goodman's portrayal of Robin rings true. The key moment for her is when she decides to go outside the confines of the lab with her concerns and make a formal report to the NIH. At that point, as the novel makes clear, the issue is no longer the alleged misconduct in the lab but Robin herself. She finds her allies wherever she can, but the establishment closes ranks against her.

When a key member of the establishment has second thoughts about Robin, the novel takes yet another turn.

Even in an age of public mistrust of scientists, there is still a tacit assumption that, biased or misguided as they might be, scientists are not deliberately misleading. The cardinal rule of research is such a significant part of the foundation of the scientific method that its violation is unthinkable: data can be inaccurate, or poorly interpreted, or incomplete, but it is never, ever faked.

At least, that is what we'd like to believe, especially in the realm of those research fields that are even now struggling for the next breakthough in life-saving treatments like the often-cited "cure for cancer." In Allegra Goodman's Intuition, a young and ambitious post-doc, Cliff, seems to have found just that; the altered virus R-7 has caused tumor remissions in over half of his experimental group of mice. Not only is this virus successful, it's suddenly and dramatically so; days before the breakthrough, Cliff is strongly chastised for continuing an experiment that has been consistently failing in every other instance.

The lab is part of an independent research facility in Cambridge, jointly operated by the charismatic Sandy Glass and the dedicated Marion Mendelssohn. Sandy is the face of the operation, the well-known oncologist in a private cancer treatment center with a talent for coaxing funding out of federal and private sources. Marion is the more level-headed researcher, and her meticulous practices set a precedence in the lab. The two are close friends, but conflict arises when Sandy, anxious to stake the first claim on R-7's miraculous performance, is eager to announce the findings to the press and publish the results before Marion feels the findings have been sufficiently replicated.

Such is the reality of federally-funded research in an era where such monies are scarce; this publish-or-perish world of is realistically displayed in Goodman's compelling novel. She deftly portrays the tedium, stresses, and anxiety of lab research; as a graduate student in the biological sciences, I found her representation to be spot on. Still, this book is less about the science and more about the characters; Goodman has chosen the perfect scenario in which to observe the interactions and reactions of human beings under incredible pressure. Lab life is much like its own little bubble, and Goodman's researchers are like little guinea pigs, comfortable with the familiar confines of the lab but suddenly vulnerable and uncertain when the bubble shatters.

For shatter it does; shortly after R-7's publication, Cliff's ex-girlfriend, Robin, makes a shocking allegation: she believes Cliff's results have been faked, and files an accusation with the ethics board of the National Institute of Health, a panel reviled by the greater scientific community for its notorious witch-hunt-like prosecutions. The repercussions of this accusation reverberate throughout the lab, the scientific community, and the federal government, as Robin finds her announcement has unforeseen consequences for herself and everyone involved.

While Goodman's representation of the inside view of cancer research is so very vivid and real, the novel's strength is really in the way in which her characters interact and respond to the growing drama. It reads like an incredibly intelligent soap opera with a liberal sprinkling of social science and psychology, and each of Goodman's characters is nearly capable of stepping right off the page with the force of their verve and authenticity. This novel grips you, teasing out a range of reactions and emotions that shift as new revelations are made about the characters, and their actions and sentiments reveal new aspects of their personalities.

The novels secondary characters include an ethnically diverse group of lab techs and post-docs (perhaps my only criticism is that they seemed a little too intentionally diversified with the token international researchers), and she represents the reactions of Cliff's colleagues in accordance with their own cultural backgrounds and principles. A particularly powerful section is when People magazine comes in to do an interview and photo spread and focuses on Feng (an immigrant Chinese and fellow post-doc who assisted Cliff) as the poster-child for the discovery, rather than Cliff himself.

Cliff is not the obvious villain of Intuition, and nor is Robin the emergent heroine. Goodman wisely forces the reader to shift their devotions even as she leaves us uncertain of the truth; is Cliff the victim of random chance, poor book-keeping, or human error? Or has he deliberately manipulated the data for his own desperately-desired glory? Are Robin's concerns legitimate, or is she motivated by revenge? Meanwhile, Glass and Mendelssohn are struggling to maintain the professional integrity of the lab against the onslaught of a federal inquiry, suddenly made to be a case study of the misappropriation of taxpayer dollars.

It is for this reason that Goodman's novel is not only an incredibly gripping read, but also a timely one. She has a number of very telling points to make about the nature of the scientific method, the peer-review process, trust, and the fine line between objectivity and subjectivity. For science to be legitimate, scientists must be visionaries, and yet must pursue their visions with an unfailing objectivity, and there is no place in the scientific method for creativity beyond the formulation of the hypothesis. For this reason the novel's title, Intuition, has multiple layers of meaning; it reminds us that we are unfailingly human even when we must strive the most to be the least so.

~ Jacquelyn Gill

I liked the idea behind "Intuition", because it was the first novel I have ever encountered, which was so close to my own life and profession. Allegra Goodman managed to find the underappreciated niche and filled it with a remarkable book. The world of academic life sciences is rendered with precision in "Intuition"; it is obvious that the author took her time to really get into the work in the lab in a prestigious institute.

Marion Mendelssohn and Sandy Glass are two co-principal investigators of the lab where several dedicated postdocs and technicians work like crazy to get the groundbreaking results. The novel starts when one of the postdocs, Cliff, is reprimanded for pursuing the experiments with R-7 virus strain, which do not seem to work. Cliff is ordered to work with another postdoc, Robin (who is also his girlfriend), on her project (which also does not work although she has been trying for five years). Behind his back, Sandy and Marion discuss letting Cliff go.

Everything changes when suddenly Cliff's experiments start working and his model mice, which are injected with cancer cells and have developed tumors, after being treated with the virus, go into remission. Everyone is happy and excited, everyone has to help Cliff finish the experiments, Cliff becomes the star of the lab, gives interviews, his results are published in Nature... But Robin suspects that something might be wrong and decides to conduct her own small investigation...
I liked very much the characters in this novel - there are probably all the personality types one can see in the world of science, from the child prodigy, through the meticulous worker, the ironic pessimist, the pursuer of success, to the fame-devouring narcissist. They are from different countries and social backgrounds, which also reflects the real situation.

All the feelings the scientist might feel during the work - frustration, jealousy, tiredness, but also relief, pride and happiness after achieving the goal are also there. The work and living conditions of all levels of scientists are perfectly depicted. The non-so-scientific side of doing science is also introduced: the National Institutes of Health bureaucracy, grant writing, media attention, and, most importantly, scientific integrity, which is the main issue in this novel. There are only two things I am wondering about: how universal this story is, how many people will read it with interest equal to mine, how important the questions discussed really are to the general public; and how soon it will get obsolete - the progress in life sciences is enormously fast so in a few years this book may read like a fossilized record of past endeavors. Anyway, fortunately now postdocs earn more than seventeen thousand dollars a year...

There was enough suspense to keep the reader engrossed, and Goodman made sure that there is enough background to get even to the people who have no clue about science. The ending is very realistic though - I do not want to include a spoiler, but I just have to say that it is very much like life and not much like a novel, which I think is a good thing, but not everyone would probably agree with me.

It captures the atmosphere of bleak desperation I experienced when I did a postdoc in physics. Also, none of the characters are villains. The author makes their motivations real and shows that by acting with the best of intentions they turn the situation into a train wreck.