Published as an Editoral in: The Journal of the American Medical Association 184, 1039 (June 29, 1963):

Hubbert, raising the question, "Are we retrogressing in science?" indicates some of the cloudy aspects (1). As a result of specialization, science is in a sense impairing its own foundations. All too often it reverts to "pure authoritarianism", wherein we attend to the authorities rather than to the evidence. Modern science denies that mere authority is the warrant for credence. That textbooks, for example, should accept statements as true simply because some other book has already so declared, arouses Hubbert's ire. Uncritical reliance on authority - the negation of true science - is all too abundantly present in medicine as well as in physics.

There are many reasons for this. Supposedly no individual can hope to comprehend more than a fraction of the total mass of knowledge. He therefore marks out an area in which, through diligence as well as ability, he can master all the details. Having done so, and having published a certain number of papers, he becomes an authority for that field. For a neighboring field he willingly accepts the authority of a colleague. Knowledge thus becomes a checkerboard whose squares, sharply limited, are gradually being filled by pieces which tend to resist movement and lose mobility as they get hemmed in by other pieces.

To change the figure, we might think of knowledge as a transformed feudal system wherein each knight holds his little fief, swearing nominal allegiance to a suzerain whom, however, he ignores as much as possible. The suzerain exerts no real power. Each vassal cultivates his own scientific terrain, sometimes abusing his own serfs, sometimes granting them freedman status (by putting their names on his papers).

Political feudalism was a decentralized institution, wherein, ideally, each knight kept within his own boundaries, respecting the authority of his neighbor. (We need not concern ourselves with the quarrels that took place). But decentralization and compartmentalization had certain drawbacks, so severe that under stress the feudal system collapsed.

The domain of science, becoming more and more compartmentalized, faces an unfavorable environment which in time will maim the entire system. Centralizing principles are needed which can overcome the local isolation. Many writers have pointed out that science always seeks central guiding principles. Hubbert, for example, indicates that in science, true advance depends on the progression, not from the simple to the complex, but rather from the complex to the simple. In its early stages, scientific endeavor faces a chaotic mass of data, wherein any apparent simplicity is merely illusion based on ignorance. As science develops, the chaos is progressively simplified and, through increasing generalization, reduced to a form more readily comprehensible. For example, the discovery of oxygen and the theories of combustion, after replacing the old phlogiston theory, allowed unification of many separate areas in chemistry and physiology. The great achievements of science are those "master generalizations" which organize and render meaningful the tremendous amount of varied observational material. Knowledge of basic generalizations gives a scientist an entree into many different areas.

Master generalizations act as unifying principles to break down the boundaries of petty authoritarian domains. Whoever is educated in the great generalizations and basic concepts holds citizenship in the unified state of science and need not be subservient to the authority of the local narrow specialist.

Master principles which can unify discordant data are not readily found, any more than are great statesmen or great chiefs of state. But from time to time great new principles as well as great new leaders come into being and transform the land which harbors them. In science, especially medical science, all workers must look for new liberating principles, new great generalizations which will destroy the tyranny of specialization and safely enlarge the realm in which we must labor.

References:

1. Hubbert MK, "Are We Retrogressing in Science ?", Science 139, 884-890 (March 8, 1963).