Intuition (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: experimental mice, animal facility, lab book, Sandy Glass, Peter Hawking, Secret Service (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston's Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters' personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science. (Feb. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking, too-good-to-be-true discovery of a virus that fights cancer. Cliff, the rakish, headstrong post-doc responsible for the discovery, is on the verge of dismissal when his tumor-ridden mice exhibit stunning rates of remission; meanwhile, Cliff's co-worker and former girlfriend, spurred by personal and professional jealousy, begins to harbor suspicions about his lab work. The somewhat transparent plot is made compelling by the aesthetic delicacy of Goodman's writing—furless lab mice are "like quivering pink agar"—and by the care with which she sketches the social world of the lab. The omniscient narrative nimbly shifts perspective among a small number of complex characters, to produce a Rashomon-like inquiry into truth and motive.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385336101
• ISBN-13: 978-0385336109
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #225,392 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Heart of Science, March 10, 2006

By	Amy Tiemann "creator of www.MojoMom.com" (North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Intuition (Hardcover)

"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.

77 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bonfire of the Laboratories, March 6, 2006

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Intuition (Hardcover)

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.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A little light on the fiction, October 7, 2007

By	C. Fischer (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.