San Diego

A jury in Arizona is to decide whether the authors of a peer-reviewed paper challenging another scientist's results are guilty of defamation.

The decision to set up a jury trial, made by the state court late last month, is the latest twist in a long-running legal battle involving Ronald Dorn, a geography professor at Arizona State University. Dorn is suing the authors of an article published in Science (280, 2132–2139; 1998) in which they questioned his rock-dating methods.

He has settled out of court with one of the paper's co-authors, Wallace Broecker, a prominent Earth scientist at Columbia University, and has opted not to pursue his claims against two in Switzerland.

The remaining co-authors are Warren Beck, Douglas Donahue, Tim Jull and George Burr at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and archaeologist Ekkehart Malotki of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Dorn's method involves scraping varnish off a rock surface, treating it, and then dating it using radiocarbon analysis. In the Science article, the defendants claimed to have found traces of coal and charcoal in Dorn's samples, which they said could distort the dating results.

At a state court hearing in Phoenix last month, Dorn's attorney argued that the authors of the Science paper were involved in “manipulation of the data to make it appear [Dorn] intentionally salted” his samples, which was scientific misconduct.

Paul Carter, the Arizona assistant attorney-general defending the authors, denied the allegations. He noted that some senior science administrators at the University of Arizona judged the article to be within the scope of the researchers' employment. These administrators argued that the manuscript had received extraordinary legal and scientific review before being submitted to Science.

Carter sought dismissal of the case on the grounds that the article was a product of research work. But court judge Edward Burke said the dispute over whether the authors “exceeded all of the bounds of acceptable research and commentary” raises a question of fact that can only be decided by a jury. The trial will start in October.