Fisher Scientific Quotes

We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer.

If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene--if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage--if you were to...have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount." - Psychiatrist James T. Fisher

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

This brings us to the saddest episode int he whole smoking-cancer controversy: the deliberate efforts of the tobacco companies to deceive the public about the health risks. If Nature is like a genie that answers a question truthfully but only exactly as it is asked, imagine how much more difficult it is for scientists to face an adversary that intends to deceive us. The cigarette wars were science’s first confrontation with organized denialism, and no one was prepared.The tobacco companies magnified any shred of scientific controversy they could. They set up their own Tobacco Industry Research Committee, a front organization that gave money to scientists to study issues related to cancer or tobacco—but somehow never got around to the central question. When they could find legitimate skeptics of the smoking-cancer connection—such as R. A.Fisher and Jacob Yerushalmy—the tobacco companies paid them consulting fees.

The fish course by the camp in great throngs, unmolested as they make their way upstream. Only after four days of fish have moved safely by is the First Salmon taken by the most honored fisher and prepared with ritual care.

Here, indeed, we come upon a serious aspect of our discussion. For there is a widespread but totally erroneous impression that science is an unalterable and absolute system. It is supposed that other institutions change, but that science, after the discovery of the scientific method, remains adamant and inflexible in the purity of its basic outlook. This is an iron creed which is at least partly illusory. A very ill-defined thing known as the scientific method persists, but the motivations behind it have altered from century to century.

Diagnosis is the art of discernment, of distinguishing one state from another. But how exactly do we define the boundaries of what is normal? This question has dominated the scientific investigation of addiction, and mental illness more generally, for decades.

While we may justly blame Fisher for his obduracy and the tobacco companies for their deliberate deception, we must also acknowledge that the scientific community was laboring in an ideological straightjacket. Fisher had been right to promote randomized controlled trials as a highly effective way to assess a causal effect. However, he and his followers failed to realize that there is much we can learn from observational studies. That is the benefit of a causal model: it leverages the experimenter’s scientific knowledge. Fisher’s methods assume that the experimenter begins with no prior knowledge of or opinions about the hypothesis to be tested. They impose ignorance on the scientist, a situation that the denialists eagerly took advantage of. Because scientists had no straightforward definition of the word “cause” and no way to ascertain a causal effect without a randomized controlled trial, they were ill prepared for a debate over whether smoking caused cancer. They were forced to fumble their way toward a definition in a process that lasted throughout the 1950s and reached a dramatic conclusion in 1964.