April 14, 1994


Maggie —

I finished reading the draft last night. I've been trying to figure
out how to respond since about page 9, which is where I realized
this wasn't going to be the paper I expected.

Here's the honest version:

The first half is excellent. Sections 1 through 3 are the best
work you've done. The phenotype description is careful, the
heritability data is solid, the epigenetic framework is exactly
right for where the field is going. I would have signed my name
to any of that.

Section 4 is where I start to lose you. Not because you're wrong
— I don't think you're wrong — but because you've stopped
distinguishing between what you know and what you suspect. The
paragraph about the researcher who calls it the "quiet switch"
and won't publish — that paragraph is doing a lot of work in
the narrative and it's doing it without evidence. You're asking
the reader to trust your pattern recognition. Some readers will.
The reviewers at JDNBG will not.

Section 5 is where I have to be direct with you.

The personal disclosure is not a small thing. I understand why
you're including it. I think, knowing you, that you've been
waiting years to include it, and that this paper finally gave
you a container for it. I'm not going to tell you it's wrong to
include it. But I need you to understand what it will do to
the reception of everything that comes before it.

The moment you say "I was in one of these programs," the paper
stops being a scientific argument and becomes a personal one.
It doesn't matter how careful you've been. It doesn't matter
how good the data is. The reviewers will have a different question
in front of them, and it's not the question you want them asking.

The part that concerns me most isn't the disclosure itself.
It's the footnote. Footnote 9. "The author is aware that the
previous sentence would not survive peer review. She is leaving it."

Maggie. You can't submit that.

I know why you wrote it. I know what it feels like to have
a finding that the field isn't ready for and to be told to wait
and to keep waiting while the thing you found keeps existing
regardless of whether anyone believes you. I've been there.
You've been there. That's not new.

But this is different. The things you're describing — if they're
what you think they are — the people who know about them are
not going to be neutralized by a journal article. Publishing
this as written doesn't protect you. It just tells them you know.

I don't know what telling them you know does. I've been trying
to think about it for three days and I don't have a good answer.

Call me before you submit this. Please.

Your friend and colleague,

T.J. Kessler
Dept. of Molecular Genetics
Harwick Institute


P.S. The footnote about the unverifiable source in the References —
"one source the author is not citing because she does not know
its provenance and is not certain it is real" — I assume you know
what you're doing with that. I hope you know what you're doing.