ON POLITICAL BOOKS: Lab Rats

...When her student, Margot O’Toole, had difficulty reproducing the results, she took her qualnis to authorities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they both worked...

...Oh, sweet justice, that even powerful and once-romanticized high financiers could be made to pay for their crimes and at last be seen as the oily swindlers they are...

...It is nevertheless an important work, for it explores in scholarly detail how new discoveries are disseminated, how the exalted peer review system really works, and how difficult it is to stop fraud from permanently sullying the historical record once it has been published...

...The paper in question was never published, and the accused scientist was thrown out of his lab...

...For example, she makes no attempt to explain who is likely to cheat or why...

...LaFollette goes into some depth in describing the peer review system that is supposed to help keep research clean...

...He argued that in light of the new forensic examination, the entire paper must be considered valid once again...

...Many of his colleagues fiercely disagreed, saying that nobody has been able to reproduce the results of the Cell paper and that Baltimore would be worse than foolish to cancel the retraction before repeating the entire experiment...

...If nothing else, that policy would cut down on the list of 10, 20, even 100 names that now clutter the top of the bigger scientific reports...

...But LaFollette doubts that peer review on its own can do much to uncover fraud...

...On as president of occasion, a reRockefeller Uni- viewer may be a tnhiepnutliact idnagt a, manad- scientists to keep their house clean ”,ahYle,E,n,E appear to have because most Of them refuse to See stolen data from a massaging the results until evervthing fits perfeciy into a preordained hypothesis...

...She complains that most science reporters, far from being the “hyperactive pit bulls” most scientists believe, are in fact timid invertebrates who rarely pursue evidence of potential infra.ctions...

...But she doubts that dishonesty is as rare as most scientists believe...

...I know of one case in which a Columbia University researcher who was reviewing a paper that had been submitted to the journal, Cell, calculated that if the author had done what he claimed to have done, he would have required as many laboratory petri dishes for one brief experiment as an entire scientific team would use in 10 years...

...The author finds fault with nearly everybody in and around the scientific arena...

...Those who handle a manuscript after its submission to a journal also have the opportunity to breach the trust others have placed in them...

...Baltimore, ever reluctant to admit to any error in judgment, told The New York Times that he was planning to retract his retraction...

...Or scientists may refer in print to data that don’t exist-what Thereza Imanishi-Kari is said to have done in the widely publicized case of ing a scientific manuscript, a journal editor normally fraud that resulted in the resignation last year of her sends it out to two or three researchers who work in a famous collaborator, David Baltimore, from his post similar field for their comments and criticisms...

...As it looks now, Imanishi-Kari’s guilt or innocence may never be known...

...LaFollette does not, however, unequivocally side with those cynics who believe that fraud is epidemic...

...And how may those systems be changed by efforts to detect, investigate, mitigate, and prevent wrongdoing?’ We may be unable to count on scientists to keep their house clean, she claims, because most of them refuse to see the dirt for what it is...

...only when such considerable obligations are met, she argues, will science truly be able to serve as its own sentry...

...If scientists are going to argue that science is more pristine than nearly every other trade, the skeptic’s best ammunition is a blizzard of specific evidence to the contrary...

...Although David Baltimore, the senior author on the paper, dismissed Dr...

...Devastated and seemingly humbled, Baltimore retracted the paper...

...LaFollette does not pretend to have a tidy formula, but she believes that a good place to start is in accreditation--deciding whose names go on papers submitted fo.r publication...

...LaFollette also quotes extensively from novels about scientists, as though the way a fictional character in a Dorothy Sayers mystery responds to fraud is how it actually happens...

...And while she generally applauds whistleblowers for having the courage to defy their colleagues and expose malfeasance, she worries that, in their zeal to stamp out fraud, the watchdogs may trample the rights of the unfairly accused...

...Imanishi-Kari continues to claim her innocence and as of late July had reportedly hued her own forensic team to reanalyze the Secret Service’s analysis of her data...

...The way to combat fraud, she says, is to formalize our handling af it, admit with some detachment that a certain percentage of scientists is likely to cheat, and design a systematic method for investigating claims and punishing proven perpetrators...

...Stealing into Print: Fraud...

...They know little about the most important steps of the experiment and therefsore cannot be depended on to detect suspicious results...

...Cell block LaFollette, alas, has not managed to discover what so many of us would like to know: exactly how many scientists commit fraud...

...Louis, is not interested in merely recounting the most harrowing fraud stories, nor does she Natalie Angier is a science reporterfor The New York Times...

...One of the book’s most compelling chapters details the different types of possible research and publication fraud, a sort of guided tour of skulduggery...

...University of California Press, $30...

...She is critical of scientists who lobby to get their names on a paper but who cry ignorance or innocence when one of their coauthors turns out to be a fraud...

...In rare instances, evidence of wrongdoing may be unequivocal...

...Too often, researchers are listed as authors when they have done nothing more than provide advice over the telephone...

...She lambastes the editors of scientific journals who sit passively on the sidelines while others fight over whether a paper that appeared in their publication is genuine or a hoax...

...That happened recently at the National Institutes of Health, when Mitchell Rosner, a young graduate student, reported in Cell that he had done critical controls for experiments designed to explore the molecular details of embryonic development...

...Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing...

...or claim credit for discovering something that others have found before...

...Scientists may out-and-out fabricate an experiment, as William Summerlin did at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York when he decorated those mice with a felt-tip pen to make it seem that their skin grafts had taken...

...Baltimore thundered against political busybodying in the basilica of science and declared that Imanishi-Kari was merely a bit slapdash in her bookkeeping...

...Scientific knowledge is a major new commodity,” she writes...

...Eventuallly, the case was investigated by a congressional conunittee, before which Imanishi-Kari claimed that she had done everything that had been published, while O’Toole insisted that Imanishi-Kari’s laboratory notebooks did not jibe with the published data...

...They have no other purpose but to tell the truth...

...Stealing Into Print is by no means a completely satisfying book...

...Scientists are supposed to be the closest thing to secular divinity, our wise divulgers of nature's mysteries...

...The paper was speedily retracted in the bluntest possible language...

...The story still isn’t over...

...Still, for anybody who cares about the meaning and texture of science and who wants to see it soar once again above the current miasma of publicized fraud, Stealing into Print helps illuminate the darkness...

...This is a particularly puzzling approach, because LaFiollette has taken such pains not to indulge us with the psychodramas and operatics of genuine scientific frauds...

...Sometimes they may spot cases of apparent fraud simply in the normal course of checking over the submitted figures to see if they all make sense...

...Instead, the idea of researchers breaching our fundamental trust is frankly revolting...

...Nor is deceit limited to the authors of a paper...

...Daniel E. Koshland Jr., editor of the jouinal Science, recently declared that “scientists are ethically 99.9999 percent pure,” although he offered no evidence to support his sweeping contention...

...Here, there can be no glee, no triumph, no sense of gotcha...

...Indeed, until quite recently, scientists have treated with hostility anybody who even mentioned the word fraud, viewing the issue as a creature of media hype-blown out of proportion to titillate a public that otherwise finds science dull-which sells newspapers and feeds a growing strain of anti-intellectualism...

...Given the emotions that surround the issue of fraud in science, Stealing into Print* is surprisingly cool, cerebral, and, on occasion, dry...

...But when others subsequently questioned the experiments and performed several checks on Rosner’s work, proof that he had faked the controls was so overwhelming that Rosner had no choice but to sign a confession...

...Marcel C. LaFollette...

...For instance, LaFoiiztte relies too heavily on examples taken from nonscientific disciplines like history and art to make her points...

...manuscript to expedite their own experiments . By and large, however, LaFollette praises reviewers for their diligence and commitment...

...The best way to detect chicanery is to repeat the experiment, which no reviewer has the luxury or inclination to do...

...The most publicized example of this frustrating ambiguity is the aforememioned case of Thereza Imanishi-Kari and her disputed paper on the subject of immunology that also appeared in Cell...

...Sa I ient sol ut ions Given the difficulty of proving fraud, how can its incidence be reduced...

...By forensically analyzing the paper Imanishi-Kari had used for counting radiation signals, the agents concluded fraud had occurred...

...In particular, she questions whether scientists are capable of policing their own ranks...

...The first step is admitting the evidence by Natalie Angier the sustained gangbang of the Ameri- can economy in the eighties by a club of smug Wall Street stock boys was seeing some of those white-collar rapists end up in prison...

...So when they are caught marking the backs of mice with black ink and calling the splotches skin grafts or smoothing out a doubtful graph with a few fabricated data points, what else can one feel but profound disgust...

...They want all the benefits of another item for their resumes, but none of the responsibility for assuring that the entire paper is accurate...

...Some may scan for gross violations of logic, while others may recalculate some or all data tables...

...put somebody’s name on a paper without that person having contributed to the work...

...Furthermore, scientists’ definitions of what it means to review a manuscript vary...

...They may steal or plagiarize others’ ideas, materials, and writings...

...As a consequence, the community often engages in wholesale denial of the problem’s significance...

...Quite another reaction follows the uncloaking of a fraudulent scientist...

...The] discovery of un-’ ethical or illegal conduct contradicts scientists’ selfimages, their beliefs about how ‘real’ scientists act,” she writes...

...By considering the process of scientific publication, she opens up wider questions of responsibility and accountability...

...More often, the question of fraud is far murkier, and accusations and counteraccusations may fly for years...

...LaFollette suggests that every name listed on a publication should be held accountable for every part of the work...

...Upon receivs u b m i t t e d the dirt for what it is...

...She also suggests that the widespread use of technology such as computer networks, which can spread information swiftly and without any cross check, makes cheating easier than ever...

...try to address every aspect of scientific chicanery...

...That follow-up research, she said, trashed the initial forensic work...

...Eventually, the Secret Service got involved...

...Marcel LaFollette, a professor of science and technology policy at Washington University in St...

...ON POLITICAL BOOKS Lab Rats What to do about sciencefraud...

...O’Toole as a “disgruntled post-doc,’’ rumors of a possible misdeed would not disappear...

...And the fact that ever more cases of scientific fraud are coming to light only heightens the impression that nothing is sacred, everybody is corrupt, and that hell isn't large enough to hold all the sinners...

...Whether it is about to become so is another matter...

...Another enormous problem in rooting out fakery is distinguishing between fraud and an honest mistake...

...She proposes that there is a greater commercial incentive for researchers to cheat today than 25 years ago...

...What does the discovery of unethical conduct say about current systems for evaluating and disseminating research-based knowledge?’ she asks...

...Instead, LaFollette takes an astringent look at one piece of the intricate business of fraud: how fraudulent papers get published and what can be done to remedy, or at least lessen, the incidence of printed fraud...