Reflecting in the spring of 2005 on his lab's recent successes, which he regarded as a culmination of decades of work, UC Irvine neuroscientist Gary Lynch said: "This will be a moment when all the tribes of neuroscience come to the same campfire."
He was wrong. There was no reaction. Nothing. Initially, he couldn't even get a short paper on a crucial visualization experiment published. Lynch envisioned the experiment as a grand confirmation of his notion that a change in the physical structure of brain cells at the connections between them was responsible for the encoding and persistence of memory.
It had taken 20 years to acquire the tools to execute, and when Eniko Kramar, a senior scientist in Lynch's lab, produced a series of spectacular microscopic photographs depicting where and how the change occurred, Lynch awaited the triumphal acclamation of the lab's success.
The tribes were not at the same campfire. Many apparently hadn't yet learned that fire had been discovered.
When a paper is submitted to a scientific journal, the journal editors send it for review to panels of scientists. Peer review is the backbone of contemporary scientific legitimacy and lauded by everyone involved. It is also an opportunity for mischief and misunderstanding.
Lynch's history of antagonizing his peers sometimes made peer review more a gantlet than a critique. Richard Thompson of USC, a renowned neuropsychologist, said he had more than once nominated Lynch to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, but was told by other members Lynch would not be elected so long as they lived.
"There's a reason for his paranoia. There are a lot of people out there who don't like him. Gary doesn't suffer fools gladly," Thompson said, then paused for a moment. He chuckled and said: "And there are a lot of fools in the world."
The reviews on Kramar's paper seemed not to even acknowledge its main point -- that the lab had for the first time demonstrated the physical reorganization of cells that occurred in the final stage of long-term potentiation, or LTP, which Lynch believed was the biochemical process underlying memory.
One reviewer, in recommending against publication, complained that the scientists had only looked at a specific set of synapses, which was inexplicable as criticism. They looked there because that's where they were doing the experiment, that was where the condition they were examining existed. It was as if a traffic engineer, having proposed adding carpool lanes to the San Diego Freeway, was asked why he hadn't examined four-way stop signs in Barstow.
