Der Sündenfall: Betrug und Fälschung in der deutschen Wissenschaft [The Fall of Man: Fraud and Falsification in German Science]

  • Marco Finetti &
  • Armin Himmelrath
Raabe: 1999. 261 pp. DM34

German science lost its innocence two years ago with the exposure of what is probably Europe's worst case of scientific fraud: the now infamous Friedhelm Herrmann and Marion Brach stand accused of brazen fabrication of data in scores of peer-reviewed publications over many years.

Thirty-something Brach has admitted guilt, but says she was taught to cheat by Herrmann, who had been her mentor, scientific collaborator and lover. The “web of sex, violence and intrigue” that bound her to Herrmann was the breeding ground for the deceit, she claims. Herrmann, 11 years her senior, says Brach had not told him that she was making up results.

The case seemed to release pressure in a fermenting barrel, for German newspapers have since reported a stream of new scientific fraud cases. These include the scientifically important and much-reported case at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Cologne, where a technician was able to deceive the scientific world for years by fiddling a key assay, and the curious affair at the University of Giessen where a young veterinary scientist, stripped of his PhD, has been charged with trying to kill his whistle-blower by spiking his tea with digitoxin.

But according to the authors of this fascinating, if somewhat fatalistic book, cheating in German science is not just about the present — it has a long history, and possibly a solid future ahead of it.

Their thesis, coherently argued, is that cheating is both widespread and intrinsic to science, riddled as it is with what they alarmingly refer to as “diseases of science” — the competition for research funds, the pressure to publish and the fight for recognition in Germany's rigidly hierarchical academic society.

They argue, correctly, that the German scientific community had, at least until now, kept its collective mind closed to the possibility that scientific misconduct could exist. ‘Idealists’ believed that science was too intrinsically pure to allow for cheating; ‘rationalists’ argued that science must always expose fiction because experiments are destined to be repeated; and ‘nationalists’ claimed that scientific fraud could never happen in Germany, where scientists have not been exposed to the same pressure as their US colleagues.

The authors efficiently dispense with these arguments. Some German scientists worked on Mengele's experiments in the Nazi era, so science is not intrinsically pure; experiments can lie dormant in the literature for years before they are repeated, if at all; science is global, so there is no such thing as a national scientific culture.

They applaud the way research organizations responded to the Herrmann and Brach affair by designing codes of good scientific practice and efficient mechanisms for handling fraud within the research institution where it occurs, and by limiting damage done to the research community at large. But they fear that the unwillingness of universities to adopt the new rules will allow fraud to continue in a new regime of complacency: “Problem erkannt — Gefahr gebannt ” (problem recognized, danger eliminated).

This judges too quickly. It is true that universities and research institutes initially displayed innate hostility to guidance from above — guidance, moreover, which seemed to demand a public acknowledgement that they could, in principle, harbour cheats. But universities are already accepting that rules must be set, if only because this is now a condition for eligibility for most sources of public research funds.

Der Sündenfall 's message may err on the side of alarmism, but it is certainly a good read, even though the science behind the scientific fraud is not always clearly described. It is expertly researched and its raw material has, by its very nature, a potent human element.

The book includes numerous case studies, beginning in the 1920s with Ernst Rupp, a physicist with the AEG company in Berlin, whose burning ambition to become a university academic, through fair means or foul, turned him into Germany's first known perpetrator of scientific fraud. Rupp claimed that he had carried out an untested experiment designed by Albert Einstein in 1926 to investigate the properties of light.

Showing (apparently) the interference of electron beams, he (apparently) demonstrated the particle-wave dualism of light and matter. His claim precipitated scepticism among the academic community he sought to woo, since the technological hurdles to such an experiment were, at the time, immense. Over the next few years other German physicists were able to prove that he had lied. In his defence, Rupp produced a psychiatrist's report saying that he suffered phases of “psychogenic trances combined with spiritual weakness”, during which “he unconsciously published reports about physical phenomena which had the character of fiction”.

It is interesting to note that in the good old days fraudsters, however bizarre their excuses, always admitted their guilt when overwhelmed by evidence. Their modern counterparts usually obey their lawyers' advice to deny it to the bitter end.