Around 2001 or so, I was collaborating with a researcher in Japan on some work in planaria. We were going to do some experiments, then freeze the tissue and send it to them for transcriptomic analysis (to find out which genes are being regulated by our bioelectric interventions into the worms’ pattern memory; this was before RNAseq was available everywhere). The tissue had to be kept very cold, so we would pack it in a big box of dry ice. The whole thing was quite time-consuming and expensive. Several weeks of work from my post-doctoral fellow, then all day collecting tissue and packing it in dry ice, and then preparing the forms needed to ship it. Shipping dry ice in particular has some potential hazards associated with it, so that means lots of paper work and extra fees, plus it has to get delivered quickly (lest the ice disappear before my collaborators get it, and samples are ruined) so that means extra charges for the shipper’s most rapid shipment possible. [ in the story below, I leave out the name of the company, but it’s one of the several big ones you’ve heard of ]
We do it, and send it off. Disaster – the box never arrives, they can’t find, it’s missing. Weird… We do everything again – more time, more $, but we do it again. Would you believe, same thing – it never arrives! So now I’m thinking: ok, I’m going to insure this thing for $1,000,000.00 and if it disappears, fine, I will fund my lab for a few years off those proceeds. So we do it all over again, I pay for the insurance, etc. And then I track the package, and – BINGO – it disappears again! Woo hoo! We’re in the money now, this is way better than writing grants. I wonder how many times I can do it. So, I make my triumphant (or so I thought) call to the shipping company.
I call them up, have them check the tracking number, they confirm it’s gone. Great I say, will it be a normal check or one of those giant ones like when you win the lottery? Send it over, either way. Not so fast she says. Did I read the fine print on the shipping contract? No, I was busy reading planarian molecular biology papers, so I did not read the fine print. And here’s the best (worst) part: apparently, the contract said something about them not being liable in cases of “Act of God”.
From there we proceeded to have a 45 minute theological discussion about what constitutes an act of God. I argued that either everything is, or nothing is. I argued that God wanted them to honor the spirit of the insurance policy and pay. I asked her why God would hate molecular biology samples in particular. She was surprisingly skilled in the basic theological and philosophical arguments about the nature of causation and various epistemological limitations when trying to understand the complex chains of effects percolating through the universe. I don’t know what her job description said, but they got the right person for this.
She actually argued that having it be so selective (just my package being missing) and consistent (3 times now) is evidence that something other than random chance was happening and that it was clearly outside the remit of an insurance policy which was designed based on actuarial data on random events, not such consistent, one could even say, targeted, outcomes. At this point I myself was starting to wonder if there was an underlying reason for this that transcended the meager understanding of me and my flatworms, and even of ShipCo itself. She specifically argued that the fact that no one can figure out what happened to the box is evidence of precisely the unusual, no-one-to-blame kinds of events that this clause was meant to cover. The whole thing was absurd, but there it was – their actual failure to keep track of the box was seen as strengthening their case! I was pretty ticked off…
I can’t remember all of it, since it was a long time ago, so here is Claude’s attempt at reconstructing a similar dialog:
Claude has me suing them at the end of its story, which I didn’t do, but I did imagine a parallel world in which a great trial would revolve around deep philosophical issues about causality, responsibility, etc. Instead I went back to my flatworms and figured out a different way to do the experiment… So let this be a cautionary tale to all – read the fine print, and bone up on your philosophy.
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