The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science

  • Horace Freeland Judson
Harcourt: 2004. 463 pp. $28 0151008779 | ISBN: 0-151-00877-9
David Baltimore was embroiled in controversy when he defended a colleague accused of misconduct. Credit: B. W. SMITH/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

The scientific enterprise is unquestionably afflicted by ethical, financial and bureaucratic woes, as often reported in Nature and elsewhere. But these problems are far worse than most of us realize, according to Horace Freeland Judson in The Great Betrayal, a brazen indictment of the condition of contemporary science.

Among scientists, the theft of intellectual property is “epidemic”, Judson contends, and the enshrined processes of peer review for grants and publication have been rendered “moribund” by politics, cronyism and deceit. Furthermore, he asserts, the transition in research from healthy financial growth to a steady state is intensifying the difficulties. Judson acknowledges that the evidence for these stark assertions is scanty, because, like all clandestine, deviant behaviour, it is hard to measure precisely. “We have not yet found a way of getting at the true incidence of fraud in science,” he observes.

No matter. Taking a tip-of-the-iceberg approach, Judson extrapolates from scores of documented episodes in the pantheon of scientific fakery, many of them also recounted in a 1983 book of similar title, scope and dour conclusions, Betrayers of the Truth by William Broad and Nicholas Wade (Simon & Schuster). Judson revisits the hoary Piltdown hoax, the fakery mill that flourished in a prestigious cardiology laboratory at Harvard Medical School 25 years ago, and the fraudulent tissue-transplant reports that roiled the Sloan-Kettering Institute in the 1970s, along with others of comparable infamy.

Bringing the roll of dishonour up to date, Judson concludes that the rot is not merely episodic and occasional, but runs wide and deep. It is not, he says, the rarity supposed by Daniel Koshland when, as editor of Science in 1987, he brashly wrote that “99.9999% of [scientific] reports are accurate and truthful”. Psychopathology — the establishment aetiology for scientific misdeeds — is not the primary factor, Judson argues. Rather, the disorder is integral to modern science, inexorably arising from inadequate mentoring, veneration of high-volume publication, chases for grants and glory, political pressures for practical results, and insufficient budgets that inspire ethical shortcuts.

Along the way, Judson fires salvoes of derision at David Baltimore, best known to the public not for his Nobel prize but for his tenacious, controversial defence of a research collaborator who was accused of misconduct but officially exonerated after a decade of government inquiries. It was the Baltimore case, Judson explains, that drew him to the trail of fraud in 1991. In this, the book that ensued, Judson gives Baltimore the lengthiest, most detailed attention, and even tells us that the Rockefeller University faculty “found the data in his proffered dissertation of borderline quality at best, thin.”

Judson draws heavily on the literature of scientific delinquency. But curiously he makes no reference to the definitive work, The Baltimore Case (W. W. Norton, 1998) by Daniel J. Kevles, although Judson's book contrasts sharply with Kevles' exoneration of Baltimore. Judson, as others have before, charges Baltimore with arrogance and making misleading allegations of political interference in science. Baltimore, he states, could have ended the controversy at an early stage “by scrutinizing the disputed data and announcing that he was reconsidering the paper. This he refused to do.”

From the Baltimore case and other eruptions, old and new, Judson infers that dangerous pathologies infest the culture of science. He says they have been little touched by government-mandated safeguards in recent years that call for the ethical tutoring of graduate students, protection of whistle-blowers, retention of laboratory records, and systematic enquiry into fraud allegations. More important than the guilt or innocence of individuals, Judson insists, “is the protection of the scientific process and of the integrity of the scientific record”. These, he says, are increasingly neglected values in the intensely competitive world of modern science.

Judson certainly merits attention. A scholar and journalist with a wide acquaintanceship in the international scientific community, he is the author of a highly respected book, The Eighth Day of Creation (Simon & Schuster, 1979), and is the founder and former director of the Center for History of Recent Science at The George Washington University.

His arguments, however, strike me as being far-fetched, dated and poorly aimed. Fraud in science, to the extent that it is calculable, seems to be no worse today than in previous times. It has perhaps been checked to some extent by the aforementioned safeguards and, as Judson notes, by the power of the Internet to detect plagiarism of text, if not of ideas. Steady-state funding may pose dangers, but current annual US government spending on biomedical research has risen to nearly $30 billion, up from $12 billion in 1996, when Judson and others bemoaned what they saw as an impending steady state. Meanwhile, California and other states are planning to spend large sums on stem-cell research and other areas of biotechnology.

The main threat to scientific purity today originates in corporate money and wiles aimed at co-opting the good name of science for the pursuit of profit, as revealed in recent pharmaceutical scandals. Withholding of clinical research data unfavourable to pharmaceutical products, concealment of financial interests in drug trials, ghosted papers for the promotion of drugs, and lucrative consulting deals for academic and medical ‘thought leaders’ are among the techniques that have surfaced. As former Harvard president Derek Bok laments in Universities in the Marketplace (Princeton University Press, 2003):“Most universities have not done all they should to protect the integrity of research. Many have not even shown they are seriously concerned about doing so.”

Of these threats to the well-being of science, Judson says virtually nothing.