By Ask Vest Christiansen, Aarhus University, Denmark & John Gleaves, California State University Fullerton, USA
Scholars and researchers have always stood on the shoulders of previous generations. And they have always inspired and spurred each other to improve the current state of knowledge. When Copernicus challenged the Aristotelian world view and placed the sun at the centre of the universe, it paved the way for Galileo's discoveries and his confirmation of heliocentrism, which again laid the basis for Newton's theory of gravity. Because of the geographical distance, lack of resources, the general level of education and several other factors, these discoveries, however, took place over the span of centuries. Today the process of research has accelerated radically. As John Sexton points out in an eye-opening article in Scientific American in October (vol. 307, issue 4, pp. 36-40), have we over the last two decades seen an explosion in scientific capacity and a solid movement toward international collaboration. For example: "In 1996 25 percent of scientific articles were written by authors from two or more countries; today the number is more than 35 percent." Also, the epicentre of research is no longer necessarily North-Western Europe or the USA since countries that previously were almost invisible in the science community are now blooming. Countries like Brazil, India, and China more than doubled their expenditure on research and development in the last decade. Lots of other statistics point in the same direction, indicating that what we are witnessing is not just any other arbitrary variation but is, as Sexton writes, best understood as "a seismic change in the scope and reach of scientific research across national boundaries". The people we now believe to be our colleagues are people we would probably never have communicated with, let alone met, just a few decades ago. One primary source for this change is the speed of communication, which also implies that we now understand community in a different way; "we are more accustomed to come into intellectual contact with strangers", Sexton writes, "and we have a much deeper relationship with our collaborators." Before becoming over-enthusiastic we should, however, also be aware of the drawbacks of fast communication and increasing publication rates. The funding structure of universities and individual researchers, with the incitement to publish 5,000-7,000 word articles in international peer reviewed journals, has also resulted in more unimportant work, more conventional thinking or downright stupid research projects being carried out and published. We have every reason to fear that this sometimes happens on the expense of more thorough, slowly developing projects published in multi-chapter books, which now counts for no more than one or two peer reviewed articles.
Nevertheless, the INHDR has never been characterised by uniformity or conventional thinking (perhaps that is why it can be hard obtaining funding for humanistic and social science doping research), and it appears that Sexton's description of network research and the possibility of developing research collaboration with colleagues on the other side of the planet, fit well with the INHDR. And although there is risk of committing the is-ought fallacy here, his description also points to the necessity of keeping an international collaborative research network like INHDR alive.
In this newsletter we also have two thought provoking commentaries, one by Jason Mazanov, and one by our new member Marcel Reinold. In his piece on "The Lance Bomb" Mazanov puts a new angle to the Lance Armstrong debate arguing that with its decision the "USADA has let the proverbial genie out of the bottle." Thus, if "the Lance Bomb is to be about the integrity of sport rather than Lance Armstrong, the UCI needs to command an in-depth retrospective investigation into the extent of doping across all the Tours." The absurdity of this exercise, Mazanov argues, illustrates that on a more fundamental level we must recognise that it is "time to think of alternative ways of handling drugs in sport." […] "The time has come for the best and fairest to step forward and rethink this issue innovatively rather than repeating the same tired arguments about cheating." Dealing with similar questions Reinold in his piece takes a historigraphical point of departure in pointing out how the "question of whether we can really learn from history at all and, if so, what exactly we can learn for shaping the present and the future" has always been a crucial question. Reinold exemplifies this by demonstrating how the development of anti-doping went from "doping as an uncontrolled practice via the establishment of an anti-doping system with occasional in-competition-tests to a rigid monitoring system which constantly supervises athletes’ urine, blood and biological profiles, and, additionally, operates with investigative bodies outside of sports." Furthermore, "there is little doubt", Reinold argues, "that we are still within a process of constantly increasing restriction and control." This process prompts the important question on "how far can anti-doping really go without losing its moral adequacy?"