Robert P Crease's "The Leak"

Robert P Crease is a philosopher and historian of science at Stony Brook University. In 2021 he received the Lord Kelvin medal and prize for 21 years of his “Critical Point” column explaining humanities concepts for scientists, and scientific ideas to humanists.

Crease applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and reported the following:

Page 99, prefaced by a sentence and sentence-fragment from page 98 for comprehension:

The trio were frustrated at how little their voices were being heard. Week after week, militant activists turned up at meetings – some dressed in lurid costumes – stated their positions in over-the-top language, and instead of staying to discuss with the scientists they would leave to be interviewed by reporters. The activists were more colorful than the scientists, and the ones who got standing that night on the news.

Over the next few days, Graves, Ocko, and Shanklin canvassed friends to see if any wanted to create an informal action group. They shared “a sense of outrage,” Shanklin put it, over the difference between “the way Newsday, politicians and activists reported news about the lab” and their own experiences. Shanklin, who had been at the lab half a dozen years, found it “a place where intellectual contribution was valued above numbers of published papers. A place where, if someone was ill, people got together to help the family. A place where newcomers from the outside were welcomed with information, help and support. In short, it just seemed like a place that had values that really mattered.”

Bioinformatics specialist Sean McCorkle was interested. He had attended a Forbes town hall and had been terrified. “I thought, ‘This is what it must have felt like to be a 14-year-old girl charged with witchcraft in the 1600s,’” he said. “People were saying that Brookhaven had nuclear weapons and was carrying on human radiation experiments and was poisoning the water. It was like an X Files episode—but they believed it was real. When I came home I had to have a couple of beers to calm down.” In McCorkle’s high school days in Maryland he had read science books with pictures of Brookhaven and its discoveries. “I assumed everyone knew about the lab,” he said. “I found it astounding that people who lived a mile away didn’t know much about it, and shocking that some people thought it was evil.”

Joanna Fowler, who was still running her “Looking for Trouble” group, was also interested. “We were in a place we’d never been,” she recalled. “We were realizing how precious the lab was, the freedom we had in it, and how important that was to young scientists. I loved the lab, and I was afraid we’d lose it.”

Astoundingly, readers of page 99 find themselves at the core of the story. The book is about people from different backgrounds and disciplines who suddenly find themselves joining together to confront an existential threat. Agenda-driven politicians, sensationalizing media, and militant activists have promoted fake facts and unfounded conspiracies to destroy the work of their important, safely operating, scientific laboratory. Page 99 happens to be the transition moment, when it dawns on these individuals that it’s not enough to think “Science will prevail” or that the government will step in and set things right. They have to act.

The book is about an early warning signal what’s happening today in episodes like global warming, vaccines, and other areas where science matters – and what needs to be done long before page 99.

Visit Robert P Crease's website.

--Marshal Zeringue