The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science

478 Pages·2004·31.155 MB·English

by  Horace Freeland Judson

the
GREAT
BETRAYAL
FRAUD IN SCIENCE
THORACE FREELAND JUDSON.
The
GREAT
BETRAYAL
Also by Horace Freeland Judson
The Techniques of Reading
Heroin Addiction in England
The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology
(Expanded Edition, 1996)
The Search for Solutions
The
GREAT
BETRAYAL
FRAUD IN SCIENCE
HORACE FREELAND JUDSON
Harcourt, Inc.
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Copyright © 2004 by Horace Freeland Judson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Judson, Horace Freeland.
The great betrayal: fraud in science/Horace Freeland Judson.—Ist ed.
pcm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-15-100877-9
1. Fraud in science. I. Tile.
Q175.37.J84 2004
344'.095—dc22 2004005906
Text set in Adobe Garamond
Designed by Ivan Holmes
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
ACEGIKJHFDB
for Olivia
Ach! Furchtbar ist Gewissen ohne Wahrheit.
—Sophocles, Antigone, Friedrich Hélderlin, translator
CONTENTS
PREFACE Xi
PROLOGUE I
A Cutrure of Fraup 9
‘Wuat’s It Like? A Typology of Scientific Fraud 43

H
N
PATTERNS OF CompLicity: Recent Cases 98
W
w
W
Harp To Measure, Harp To DeFInE: The Incidence
R
m
of Scientific Fraud and the Struggle Over Its Definition 155
Tue BaLTrmore AFFAIR 191

a
w
THE PROBLEMS OF PEER REVIEW 244
AUTHORSHIP, OWNERSHIP: Problems of Credit,
Plagiarism, and Intellectual Property 287
Tue Risz OF OPEN PUBLICATION
ON THE INTERNET 325
Lasoratory TO Law: The Problems of Institutions
When Misconduct Is Charged 369
EPILOGUE 404
NOTES AND SOURCES 419
INDEX 447
PREFACE
On 22 March 1991, the front page of The New York Times carried the
headline Brococisr WHo Disputep a Stupy Parp Dzarty. The
story, by Philip Hilts out of the Times's Washington bureau, was a
miniature profile of a scientist named Margot O”Toole, who had
raised questions about a paper originating in two laboratories at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published five years earlier
in the journal Ce/l. A senior author of the paper was David Baltimore,
who when the Times's account appeared was president of Rockefeller
University, in New York. A co-author was Thereza Imanishi-Kari,
who back when Cel/ran the paper had headed the small laboratory at
MIT where O”Toole was on a one-year fellowship. Baltimore had
brushed O’ Toole off as a “a disgruntled postdoctoral fellow.” She had
been driven from science; she and her husband had had to sell their
house; she had gone to work answering the telephone at a moving
company her brother owned. Now, however, a draft of a report about
the dispute over the paper had leaked from the Office of Scientific In-
tegrity, at the National Institutes of Health. The draft declared that
O'Toole had been right about the paper, that she was a heroine who
had “maintained her commitment to scientific integrity,” and that
data originating with Imanishi-Kari had been faked.
The case was certainly pungent. It was new to me, but took its
place in my awareness of a rising number of scientific frauds that had
been uncovered in recent years. I turned to the inside page. What
xii HORACE FREELAND JUDSON
immediately caught my eye was the name of a friend, Mark Ptashne,
a molecular biologist at Harvard who, the account said, had taken up
O’Toole’s case, had got her a job back in science at Genetics Institute,
a biotechnology company I knew he had founded, and who now
spoke out on her behalf.
I was at Stanford University that year as a senior visiting scholar
in history of science. I telephoned Ptashne: “You're getting your fif-
teen minutes of fame?!” He said, “No, wait! This is a serious and in-
teresting case!”—and proceeded to tell me much more about it,
about Baltimore’s involvement, and about O’Toole.
That is how this book began. I got in touch with Walter Stewart and
Ned Feder, two scientists at the NIH who were following the Balti-
more—Imanishi-Kari affair closely; I went into the matter with O’Toole
and asked to interview Baltimore, whom I had first met twenty years
earlier when working on The Eighth Day of Creation, a history of molec-
ular biology. I talked with a number of other scientists, among them
Gerald Edelman, an immunologist of erudition, dominating intelli-
gence, and philosophical bent, who was at Rockefeller University and
had no love of Baltimore. Back at Stanford, sometime in January I got a
call from Martin Kessler, editor in chief and publisher of Basic Books, in
New York, a firm he had founded. I knew something of Kessler’s house:
big books on serious subjects, worthy, sometimes ponderous. He ex-
plained that he was Edelman’s publisher and had learned from him that
I was planning a book about fraud in science. He had been looking for
just such a book; what I described to him, he said, was exactly what he
had in mind. I had a contract, though, with my publishers, Simon and
Schuster, for two other books, but one of these I had decided not to
write, and the other, all but completed, they did not really want to pub-
lish. I told Kessler that I was negotiating to kill that contract.
By early summer, I was free to write a prospectus, and soon
signed with Kessler. But then he moved to the Free Press. Before he