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71 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Heart of Science, March 10, 2006
"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.
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85 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bonfire of the Laboratories, March 6, 2006
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.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An insightful and thought-provoking novel about science, faith, and truth, March 7, 2006
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
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