Reunion with Professor Cantor | Yasuhiro Naito, Vice Dean/Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
2020.03.10
I was reunited with Professor Cantor after 25 years. The professor is the protagonist of the novel "Cantor's Dilemma." The author is Carl Djerassi, a Jewish man born in Vienna. He was a chemist who fled from Hitler to the United States, where he flourished, leaving behind Nobel Prize-worthy achievements as a scientist. Cantor's Dilemma was first published in 1989, and its Japanese translation, "Professor Cantor's Dilemma," was published in 1994. At the time of writing, Djerassi was a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
*Please be aware that the following contains major spoilers for "Cantor's Dilemma."
I read this book (as I recall) around the summer of my final year of undergraduate studies, when I had decided to go to graduate school, on the recommendation of a senior student in my lab. "Cantor's Dilemma" is a work of fiction that depicts Professor Cantor, who has a lab at a university in the American Midwest (probably the University of Illinois), fiercely competing with scientists at research institutions blessed with abundant resources in every respect, such as Harvard and MIT, as he races toward winning the Nobel Prize with his innovative theory on the process of carcinogenesis and its verification. The selection process for the Nobel Prize and the proceedings of the ceremony are described in frighteningly minute detail, making it an interesting read just for its depiction of the inside story.
Also, as one would expect from a book written by a top-tier scientist, the dramatic twists and turns from the conception of the research to its publication are depicted in detail. Having not yet written a single academic paper myself, I was thrilled by the development where the researcher Stafford verifies Professor Cantor's idea with his extraordinary experimental skills, and they discuss whether to submit the paper summarizing the results to "Science" or "Nature." After their original paper explaining the process of carcinogenesis is successfully published, Professor Cantor receives reports that a prominent lab in the same field cannot reproduce his experimental results. Then, the possibility that there may have been a flaw in Stafford's experiment comes to light. The Cantor-Stafford experiment, which had garnered acclaim from molecular and cell biologists around the world, might have a serious flaw. They must urgently conduct follow-up experiments to confirm whether their results were wrong or, after all, correct. While their anxiety grows, the pair's reputation soars, they are rumored to be under consideration for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and finally, their win is decided in quick succession. There is still no confirmation that the experiment was correct—should he accept the Nobel Prize, believing that his correctness will eventually be confirmed, or should he confess the uncertainty of the results described in the paper and decline the award? This is Professor Cantor's dilemma, which gives the book its title. It could be called the greatest dilemma a natural scientist can experience.
Using this as the main thread, the novel portrays various aspects of natural science research. One character's roommate is a philosophy graduate student devoted to Bakhtin, who attempts to "deconstruct" the arguments of natural scientists by asking naive questions like, "Why are people who haven't written a single character of the text listed as authors on natural science papers?" or "Why can't you submit directly to the academic journal PNAS yourself?" This back-and-forth, which highlights the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities, is truly enjoyable. Furthermore, the book is packed to the brim with topics like career development for female scientists, the maneuvering surrounding tenure, and the stratagems for securing grants.
I encountered this Professor Cantor before I had almost any experience as a scientist.
Twenty-five years later, after a haphazard journey that bore no resemblance to Professor Cantor's strategically built career, I too became a university professor. And I once again encountered the nostalgic "Cantor's Dilemma," with its humorous cover design by Shinbo Minami, and bought a clean used copy for a price an order of magnitude smaller than what I paid back then.
Rereading "Cantor's Dilemma" after a quarter of a century brought many surprises. I could feel the changes brought by the passage of 25 years everywhere. The author, Djerassi, passed away five years ago.
In a scene where Professor Cantor asks Stafford to conduct an experiment to confirm his theory, he says something like, "It's nice that you have convenient things like the Citation Index now. When I was your age, we only had the Index Medicus." The Index Medicus was a thick book that collected only the titles of medical sciences papers, and long ago, people relied on such secondary sources to order papers. By mail, of course. The Citation Index was a "paper database" in booklet form that listed and allowed searching for papers that cited a given academic paper. Its appearance made it much more efficient to find prior research related to the study one was about to undertake. So, the cutting edge for Professor Cantor was the Citation Index, but the library of the university I attended also had rows of these secondary sources on shelves near the entrance. What was a little newer was that there were two PCs, and we could use Medline, a medical sciences paper database on CD-ROM that was updated monthly. Searching by PC was revolutionary, and since few people were accustomed to PCs back then, I could practically monopolize one machine and stay glued to Medline.
Today, all these services are available via the internet, and many databases are open to citizens worldwide for free. The biggest rate-limiting factor has shifted from the speed of information transmission to human processing speed. Papers found through searches no longer require a restless wait for them to arrive by mail; they can be instantly downloaded from electronic journals. Cantor and Stafford considered the difference in mailing time to the United States versus the UK when choosing a journal for submission, but now that even paper submissions are online, the location of the editorial office is no longer an issue. The academic journal PNAS now allows anyone to submit. "Nature" and "Science," which were positioned as rapid communication journals, have transformed into journals that publish many full-length papers by posting supplementary materials on the web.
"Cantor's Dilemma," which was a contemporary work of fiction, has become a vivid snapshot that makes one feel the changes that 25 years have brought to the environment of scientists.
I can now clearly see the big lie planted in the story. The Nobel Prize-winning theory is, of course, fictional, but the process from its conception to verification and even winning the Nobel Prize progresses in such an impossibly short period that it's unbelievable even for a story set in the 1980s. However, this speed is essential to plunge Professor Cantor into his dilemma, and this big lie is supported by a variety of realistic peripheral descriptions. This aspect has a flavor similar to that of excellent science fiction novels.
Regarding the gap that lies between the natural sciences, the humanities, and even the social sciences, I myself have faced, seen, and heard about it on various occasions at the rare place that is SFC, and have enjoyed much of it. SFC is a small world, but it is vast. When I read this novel as a student at a local single-faculty medical university, the back-and-forth across academic disciplines felt literally as distant as an event in a foreign country, but on this campus, it is an everyday occurrence. It's amusing to think that in this respect, my 25 years of experience might have surpassed even that of the veteran Professor Cantor.
Some things have not changed. The difficulties women face in academia, although the specific circumstances differ from those described in the novel, do not seem to have changed much in 25 years. Even at SFC, which is supposed to be a free and progressive campus, the ratio of female faculty members is still low, and my impression is that it has not changed dramatically from 20 years ago when I first came here.
And Professor Cantor's dilemma, which gives the book its title, is truly a contemporary problem of research ethics itself. Moreover, unlike intentional fabrication, it sets up an extremely gray situation of "it might have been wrong," and it is precisely because the protagonists are sincere about science that they agonize. Despite there being no clear, correct answer, they must choose something of their own volition and take responsibility. That is what an ethical choice is. After a quarter of a century, Professor Cantor's dilemma has become an even more realistic and central issue.
In this way, I greatly enjoyed my reunion with Professor Cantor, and it also made me think. Encountering new things is of course enjoyable, but I hope to be blessed with more "reunions" like this in the future.
For now, I think I'd like to be reunited with Professor Somiya, who apparently lived nearby, around the time I reach retirement age. In the auditorium of a stylish movie theater, if possible.