>it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist

What, politics? ;)

I read it as truly brilliant and scathing social commentary about what's wrong with the "scientific process" as practiced (and corrupted) by academic and government institutions.

The initial premise of the book, how the message was discovered, is deeply hilarious: somebody was fraudulently selling some old computer tapes of raw space telescope data as truly random numbers, and then one of their customers got pissed off that the numbers were't random enough because they repeated, and demanded their money back.