The pursuit of scientific truth is a human activity carried by imperfect and fallible creatures in a varied social context.

However uninspiring this statement is, few would argue with it -- the natural world may indeed be ''out there'' waiting to be discovered, but its discoverers are all too human, with all the foibles, vanities and idiosyncrasies of any other field of endeavour.

Well, so what? After all, nobody cares if the guy who designed your fridge was a petty egomaniac -- all that matters is that your fridge works. But for pure research, this analogy is hardly exact and things tend to be considerably more complicated.

In the world of basic scientific research, the troubling thing is that one often doesn't even know what one is looking for, which not only makes it harder to know how to proceed, it also can make it difficult to know if success has been achieved. There are problems, there are inconsistencies, there are mysteries, but finding the right way out of the labyrinth is seldom easy.

Isolating the right gene responsible for a particular condition is hard enough -- but what if the predominant driving force is something quite different (such as an environmental factor)?

Puzzling over the solution to a profoundly difficult mathematical structure may be a waste of time (at least to the non-mathematician) if the framework is, at the end of the day, the wrong way to describe the natural phenomenon.

Such are the ambiguities of scientific research. To many, this is just a necessary consequence to participating in the world of discovery -- after all, if we all knew exactly where we were going, there wouldn't be much room for excitement or creativity.

This is true, of course, but the issue is considerably deeper. For in a culture where such ambiguity necessarily exists, human attitudes can play a greater and greater role.

In a culture where several competing theories are put forward to explain the same phenomenon, it is not unusual to hear scientists grumble that the adoption of a particular scientific viewpoint may have more to do with the passion, influence and notoriety of its advocates than the inherent, objective truth of the theory itself.

For some researchers, such notions make them dangerously uncomfortable -- to others, for whom the image of the pure, objective researcher boldly uncovering scientific truth is sacrosanct, it is little short of heretical.

After all, science is ruled not by whimsy or fashion, but by results. To pretend otherwise merely paves the way for the extreme social theorists who argue that science is nothing more than a social construct -- an absurdist view that virtually all practising scientists regard as dangerously irresponsible.

But as any scientist will ruefully tell you in their darkest hour over a beer, fashion plays a role, too. The popularity of individual theories comes and goes, and not all of it is strictly tied to an objective set of empirical results. This is particularly true for fields that are, for financial or pragmatic reasons, more detached from the regular check of experiment.

Ironically, young researchers, from whom many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have come (largely, it might be argued, from their very lack of historical baggage and pre-set scientific framework), are perhaps the most vulnerable to suffering from such sociological forces.

To an ambitious graduate student or postdoctoral fellow, it is often shocking to realize that what you think is scientifically interesting is not deemed so by the appropriate authorities -- or, worse yet, what you have been gently steered into working on for the past three years may not be quite the all-encompassing, universally regarded approach to core issues that you once naively assumed.

All part of the educational process, one might say, but there is more to it than that. If we fail to acknowledge the human aspect of science, we fail to note one of its structural weaknesses and lose a vital perspective that we need to evaluate our progress.

In short, blithely ignoring the human element in science is a dangerously unscientific thing to do.