Subject: Re: Montreal news of Fabrikant - 5

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1992 11:12:56 EDT

>I think that Fabrikant obviously was over the edge to actually kill people -
>my opinion. But the problems he  referred to, of insitutional plagerisation
>and miscredit for publications (if I have it right), are endemic in the
>academic world. As a grad student, I would say this is particularly true
>for grad students. So there is more to it than meets the eye. The press
>has tended to report him simply as a maniac, rather than examine the issues
>he was upset about.
>                   Scott

    As a Faculty member at a Canadian University, I would like to reply to
Scott's point.
    Yes, the press has reported him simply as a maniac, which he undoubtedly
was with the respect to the killings. If one wants to draw attention to issues
which one is upset about, there are a number of relatively "rational" ways of
going about it,...an extreme form of which is suicide. From what I have read of
Fabrikant's problems on these bulletin boards, it seems likely that he is a
quite gifted and creative scientist who has literally been driven to the limit
by the system, to the extent that he became maniacal. Perhaps the way to get
to understand his action is to try to think of the most telling way of
punishing an individual. The sort of problem which the fox got quite wrong
when it threw the rabbit into the briar patch (Uncle Remus).
    The opposite of the briar patch in the case of a gifted creative person
would be to REMOVE something which is essential for his creative act. In the
case of a gifted violinist, a Yehudi Menhuin, it would be, of course, to take
away his violin. In the case of a creative scientist it is to take away his
tenure, his laboratory, his source of research funds. The tragedy is that if
you took away Yehudi Menhuin's violin, he would get an old piece of wood and
string and cat gut together and stand at the street corner making such a
beautiful sound that passers by would be driven to rage that he was denied the
means of making even more beautiful sounds. Sadly, the complexities of modern
science, where discoveries sometimes are not generally recognized until after a
considerable lapse of time, makes this impossible in our profession. I think
I can understand how someone, who, rightly or wrongly, believes himself to be a
scientific equivalent  of a Menhuin,     gets driven to such a state by the
system that his behaviour becomes maniacal.
     Sincerely,
               Don Forsdyke, Department of Biochemistry, Queen's University,
                             Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L3N6.
               [Apologies if I have misspelled Yehudi Menhuin.]