Dictionary definition of “ambulance-chasing”

ambulance-chasing

n. in science, doing research to achieve fame or to secure funding. Subjects: English, Business, Science, Slang

Editorial Note: This is, of course, a variation on the “ambulance-chasing” most-often associated with lawyers. Both meanings might be generally defined as “seeking to benefit by other than altruistic behavior.”

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Citations: 1994 Gary Taubes Sciece (Mar. 25) “Microwave mappers sweat details” vol. 263, no. 5154, p. 1682: As a result, theorists haven’t been able to resist interpreting these statistically suspect results. It’s an activity that Neil Turok of Princeton University (himself a theorist) describes as “ambulance chasing—running after these experiments hoping one of them will disprove some theory.” 1999 Alastair Sarre Ecos (July-September) “Ecology takes on the human touch” p. 40: Ambulance-chasing?…Some say that the division has become an “ambulance-chaser,” pursuing funding opportunities regardless of their relevance to the core work of the division. 1999 Pennie Taylor Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland) (Oct. 17) “GM link of scientist who discredited safety fears” p. 1: Gatehouse has accused the paper’s authors of conducting “a piece of ambulance-chasing research that is coming in on the coat-tails of the GM controversy.” 2002 AgBioWorld (Apr. 2) “Nature Disavows Mexican Maize Article!!, Cottoning on in India”: Scientists sensationalize stuff because they get noticed… They’re staking out their territory, causing alarm, so that there’s more funding in that area.…There is more and more a trend to what some people call “ambulance chasing” science. 2007 Rick DelVecchio San Francisco Chronicle (California) (Mar. 22) “Professor urges social priorities in BP institute”: Socially determined objectives must thus lead and direct this effort, not become relegated to “ambulance chasing,” following behind a series of technically compelling yet socially questionable discoveries, papers or patents. 2007 Amar C. Bakshi Washington Post (June 26) “Why Clinical Research in India Outpaces U.S.”: “Clinical research and translational research is down 70% in the U.S.,” he tells me, laying out two primary explanations: First, he blames “the lobbies, restrictions, confidentiality problems, insurance companies regulating what needs to be done, what can be done, what cannot be done…the usual ambulance chasing that occurs.” 2007 Dennis Overbye New York Times (July 24) “At Fermilab, the Race Is on for the ‘God Particle’”: In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons. But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true.

Posted 25 Jul 07 | Permalink | Tell a Friend