Science: Parable of the Brickyard

Science is like a brickyard.

How so? If you’re a biochemist, you might be thinking about BioBricks. But that is not what Bernard Forscher’s 1963 letter in Science is about. “Chaos in the Brickyard” is a cautionary tale of how the enterprise of science can veer off-course, missing the forest for the trees – or perhaps the branches, twigs or leaves.

That was 55 years ago. Forscher’s dystopian predictions have come to pass, possibly exceeding anything he might have imagined. Like an Aesop fable, the one-page letter is structured as a parable. You will experience the full impact reading it in its entirety, but to whet your appetite, I will just quote the first sentence or two of each paragraph.

Once upon a time, among the activities and occupations of man there was an activity called scientific research and the performers of this activity were called scientists. In reality, however, these men were builders who constructed edifices, called explanations or laws, by assembling bricks, called facts…

It came to pass that builders realized that they were sorely hampered in their efforts by delays in obtaining bricks. Thus there arose a new skilled trade known as brickmaking, called junior scientists…

And then it came to pass that a misunderstanding spread among the brickmakers… [They] became obsessed with the making of bricks… the ranks of the brickmakers were swelled by augmented training programs and intensive recruitment…

And so it happened that the land became flooded with bricks. It became necessary to organize more and more storage places, called journals, and more and more elaborate systems of bookkeeping to record the inventory… the size and shape [of bricks] was now dictated by changing trends in fashion…

The letter concludes that the builders, those who construct edifices, are “almost” destroyed. The reasons are sad, and seemingly inevitable. Here’s the last sentence of the concluding paragraph.

And saddest of all, sometimes no effort was made even to maintain the distinction between a pile of bricks and a true edifice.

Forscher would agree that bricks are crucial to the edifice, and that the making of bricks is an important task. But there might be something rotten in the core of the guild of builders. Is it that the reward system for how one advances in the guild has been skewed? Is it because the quantitative exercise of counting bricks seems ‘easier’ than a qualitative evaluation of… for lack of a better word, quality? We scientists know how to get at tricky measurements – find an appropriate proxy. But after multiple uses of the proxy, it morphs into its own unit of measurement and establishes itself as a rubric – the acid test, to use an analogy from chemistry.

Assessment, previously qualitative and less data-driven, has now morphed into its own science of building. The builders are fewer, while brickmaking is on the rise. A new exalted activity has arisen. Brickmeasuring. It feeds on data from piles of bricks. I can only speak knowledgeably of higher education, as my entire career thus far is in this realm, but there is more chaos in the brickyard than ever before.