Why (some) scientists shouldn't review fiction
A central figure in Richard Powers's latest novel, "Generosity," is an Algerian refugee living in Chicago, taking evening writing courses. Having experienced trauma during the civil wars that have racked Algeria, she is still remarkable optimistic about life.
Her resilient personality, first noticed by her writing teacher, comes to the attention of a scientist who has been studying the genetic basis for resilience. The researcher finds in the woman the "optimal allele assortment--the happiness jackpot," and hopes that by studying her he might ultimately be able to create drugs that will ease the psychological pain of other humans. Whether this kind of intervention in the human psyche would be a good thing to attempt is the moral conundrum at the novel's heart: How much misery can we "cure" without deforming our humanity?
A promising premise for a novelist of ideas. But Peter D. Kramer, the author of "Listening to Prozac" and "Against Depression," spots a problem right off the bat. Powers's latest effort, it seems, was inspired by a much-cited paper, published in 2003, by a team led by the Duke University psychiatrist Avshalom Caspi. Caspi found a link between the possession of a variant of a certain gene and being able to rebound from trauma.
Kramer, writing in Slate, notes that an article published last summer, in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," cast serious doubt on Caspi's findings. (And he adds that that he himself had written in "Against Depression" that he didn't think the Caspi results would hold up.)
The very premise of Powers's book, therefore, is "now cast into doubt." "What very bad luck," Kramer recalls thinking when he discovered the clash between the findings and Powers's plot.
But hold on: Can it really be the case that the success or failure of speculative fiction turns on the outcome of specific scientific studies?
If some real-world variant of Soma ("All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects"), proved to be a dud in clinical tests, that would be quite interesting in a scientific sense--and entirely meaningless where "Brave New World," the novel, is concerned.
The Providence-based Kramer's passion about the research on depression--specifically, his skepticism about Caspi's work--winds up leading him weirdly astray. He imports the criteria for judging work in one field (academic psychology) into another (fiction), with befuddling, and befuddled, results.
