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Anyone who thinks peer review process encourages and winks of his comrades have never faced a harsh reality with a job pulled out from each other, says Jenny, Ron (who)

Jenny writes the Mind The Gap blog

While commuting into the lab the other day, I couldn't help overhearing an animated discussion between two men across the train carriage from me. From context, I pieced together that they were talking about climate science.

\\ "The thing about these scientists," said the first guy, with an unpleasant accent on the last word, "that they get a load of grant money, so they just make things up, making their study to look good. They do not 'does not really care about the truth. "

"They can't be objective," the second guy agreed. "It's all driven by money these days."

"It sounds more serious if they pretend that the ice caps are melting," said the first guy. "Then they're more likely to get more grants to make up more stuff the next time."

Many years of practice on public transport have taught me how to keep a straight face â€" and a firmly clenched jaw â€" when hearing utter poppycock in progress. But I still find it distressing when people bad-mouth my profession. This little exchange may not represent the views of your average person, but it is not the first time I've heard such an accusation. Even mainstream British journalists have been known to imply that scientists are motivated more by money than the truth.

Such disparaging claims are doubly infuriating considering the immense effort that most scientists employ to prevent themselves from being falsely swayed. Take peer review as a prime example. Far from being "largely hokum", or a biased perusal by a crony, liable to nudge-wink away any inaccuracies, a referee report can be about the harshest criticism you will ever face. Believe me, I've seen some that make a drubbing on RottenTomatoes.com look like a gushing five-star review. My friends and I like to collect amusing referee put-downs, and our list includes phrases such as "incredibly lame", "utterly puerile" and (my favourite) "What are these guys smoking?"

If even the remotest soft white underbelly exists in your research, peer reviewers will home in on it unerringly and make you fix it. And if you don't fix it to the journal editor's satisfaction, your paper will not see the light of day.

Although the safety of anonymity probably encourages the nastiness of some peer reviewers, punches don't get pulled much in the flesh, either. After the very first talk I ever gave at an international symposium, one of the field's worthies rose to his feet in the hushed auditorium and proclaimed, with a scathing sneer, that my theory was completely misguided. I was too shocked to make the reasoned rebuttal that I could easily manage today, and too innocent to realise that the man's chief objection stemmed from the threat that my (ultimately true) findings cast on his own work. Since then, I have seen many colleagues skewered on the podium in their turn, and know that such friction â€" whether misguided or spot-on â€" is all part of the process of polishing truths out of rough ore.

Until one day â€" just last week â€" I performed the definitive experiment, looked through the microscope and felt an almost visceral clicking into place: my theory appeared to be true.

And I almost fell off my stool in surprise, so primed had I been to expect failure. You couldn't really call it a eureka moment: modern molecular biology doesn't tend to move in paradigm shifts. Every finding is incremental and bitty in the grand scale of biological complexity, and we scientists are but tiny cogs in a vast, global knowledge machine.

So, let 'call it eurekalette. Anyway, I 've been walking with a little spring in my step ever since, and am looking forward to pulling it all together in a manuscript, I m writing to'.

So the next time you hear someone asserting that scientists aren't critical, of their own work or that of their colleagues, remember that if a finding has made its way into a reputable journal, it's most likely despite every last objection that the researcher and all of his lab-mates could come up with â€" to say nothing of those nasty peer reviewers.

Bless 'em.

Jenny Rohn is a research fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology at University College London and writes a regular blog at Mind The Gap

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