For the moment, although the critical experiments were performed blind and in two different laboratories, and although the statistics provided are rendered superfluous by the magnitude and reliability of the transmission effect, no journal editor dares touch the article reporting this research. An anecdote illustrates the situation. Preoccupying as this situation may be, both for ourselves and the research community, we have managed to continue our work. Perhaps the reader will understand just how enormously absurd the situation is if we describe life in the average government or academic research lab like our own, in France, in the closing decades of the 20th century. Like medieval wandering scholars, researchers come and go and, within the laboratory structure, change teams, hobnob over coffee, and drop by for chats with colleagues.
Researchers examine each others' results.
This sharing of results may be formalized, as it often is in the United States. In France, our laboratory was rare in that one entire morning per week was devoted to the presentation and criticism of results. On the contrary, our results were produced in an open and transparent environment, under the scrutiny of a changing population of more or less involved professionals. Nor were our results produced under pressure from the laboratory head, as has also been claimed. In French government institutions, like our old laboratory, the director has little power over staff members, from the most senior researcher to the humblest technician, due to the fact that their employer is the Ministry of Research rather than any particular research laboratory.