Death of Michel Schiff: Censorship in the Press
A Case of Censorship in the Press
December 26, 2004
Our friend Michel Schiff passed away in December. I found the announcement in Le Monde, under the title "Michel Schiff, the Three Lives of a Researcher." He is described as a "physicist and psychologist, representative of a certain generation of 'permanent rebels.'" He was 71 years old. As a child, he narrowly escaped the 1942 Jewish roundups and managed to cross into Switzerland. After returning to France, Schiff pursued brilliant studies, completing a physics thesis in the United States. Upon his return, he joined a physics team at the CNRS. But in 1970, he decided to switch to... psycho. Le Monde notes that "only Stanislas Tomkiewicz, a major figure in research but also a marginal, agreed to take Schiff into his team." Schiff's study, supervised by Tomkiewicz, was published in 1978 in the journal Science. And Le Monde wrote:
"There begins the third life of Michel Schiff: that of an uncompromising critic of our educational system, of science as it is practiced, and more generally of our society. He published several scathing works, including The Wasted Intelligence (Le Seuil). A relentless researcher, a sharp interlocutor, Michel Schiff was undoubtedly, as he himself liked to say, ein Mensh (in Yiddish, a man in the full sense of the word)."
The article is signed Claire Meljac.
One thing should be noted: Le Monde does not mention an important book published a few years ago by Michel Schiff, titled A Case of Censorship in Science, dedicated to the tragedy experienced by our mutual friend Jacques Benveniste. This omission is neither coincidental nor accidental. Jacques thus dies twice. Personally, I have long since lost any illusion about the intellectual objectivity of Le Monde, and beyond that, the rationality of its editorial team. How often have I heard: "But why don't you just write a letter to Le Monde asking them to publish it?" I never received a reply in twenty-five years.
Le Monde is now nothing more than a myth.
A reader's reaction dated December 28.
Hello,
I just read your article on your website about Michel Schiff and Le Monde. Regarding A Case of Censorship, Isabelle Stengers published the text below in Le Monde ten years ago.
Best regards,
Kamil Fadel
Head of the Physics Department
Palais de la Découverte
The text by Isabelle Stengers:
In July 1988, as the controversy over "water memory" was erupting, Pierre Thuillier concluded an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (dated July 8–14) with these words: "We must wait. It would be dangerous to say today: we must reject Benveniste's experiments... Patience: we will know." All the trust we place in science lies in that "we will know." More than six years later, Michel Schiff, a CNRS researcher, published A Case of Censorship in Science. Having contacted Benveniste’s INSERM Research Unit 200 to study obstacles to scientific communication, Schiff reached the strange conclusion that no such "obstacles" existed—because there had, in fact, been no genuine attempt at communication, no real scientific controversy. The panic before the unknown. He was dealing with a case of "repression," of blockage, in short, of censorship. A difficult decision for a researcher: to "take sides" in a cause he had come to study. A courageous decision, for which we owe him a sincere and indignant book, meticulously detailing how, when common sense at the moment deems "impossible" what a scientific controversy should test, anything goes. It would take too long to recapitulate all the anomalies that mark the history of "water memory," from the extraordinary move of the journal Nature sending an investigative team whose composition revealed it considered only two alternatives—fraud or methodological error—down to the public support given to Benveniste by intellectuals equally unqualified (Le Monde, March 1, 1994). More generally, while controversies—especially those surrounding a candidate for the status of "experimental fact"—should involve only competent laboratories, in this case, everyone had their own opinion, their personal take on how to make the anomaly disappear: the surest sign that the "fact" was not even considered worthy of debate. Benveniste’s ongoing research today holds about the same status as parapsychology. Prioritizing convincing skeptics, they face an automatic judgment: anyone tempted to be convinced is labeled a "dupe" or "believer" and thereby disqualified. Michel Schiff challenges the panic before the unknown, conformity, and self-censorship: he proposes a "psychological perspective on scientific repression." Perhaps, by doing so, he helps sustain the ideal of a free, lucid, and daring science, where every candidate fact should receive a "fair hearing." Perhaps the real question about science is: how can it still be somewhat innovative, despite ruthlessly and conformistically filtering out what it deems worthy of interest, and what it certainly wouldn’t waste serious time examining? Still, there is no reason to endorse the choices of the privileged paths of scientific innovation. While we cannot question the necessity for the scientific institution to select from the endless crowd of obscure and fragile "facts" those that will receive time, effort, and financial resources, we can criticize the "kick of the donkey" it delivers to what it rejects—the way it legally disqualifies what it practically ignores. In this way, it creates the false impression of a logical and rational progression, saving—just wait and trust—everything that deserves saving. A Case of Censorship in Science is a healthy antidote: scientific choices are highly debatable, like all other human choices.
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