Dishonesty in Science
Your editorial, “Science Must Police Its Ranks” (Nov. 30), contains several factual and conceptual errors that should not pass uncorrected.
First, regarding the Thereza Imanishi-Kari case, Nobelist David Baltimore did not indulge in “a questionable practice that is too common, his name was put on the paper even though he had nothing directly to do with the study.” In fact, the publication in Cell in 1986 was a product of a collaboration between the laboratories of Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari, and much of the data in the paper were generated in Baltimore’s laboratory, not in Imanishi-Kari’s. Those data have not been challenged. Baltimore established a collaboration between his laboratory and one with a complementary area of expertise, a practice that is virtually universal in biological science and has much to do with our current progress in that discipline.
Second, it is a matter of judgment whether Baltimore “resisted making a correction” or whether he simply implemented the rule that lies at the basis of our legal system: innocent until proven guilty. The scientific community was alerted to the allegations and problems with Imanishi-Kari’s contribution to their joint publication in a timely and responsible fashion (in 1988, 1989 and 1991; all in letters to the editor of Cell). Your assertion that Baltimore indulged in “questionable” practices is simply false.
Third, the expenditure of significant sums of money by Congress on the Commission on Research Integrity is assuredly a waste of taxpayers’ money. Science has a self-correcting mechanism: Any experiment of even the slightest interest is likely to be repeated in several other laboratories. There is no scientific cartel seeking to disguise falsehood and fraud; it is the nature of science itself to expose errors. Published experiments that do not replicate usually turn out to be the result of an honest mistake, or slight (but significant) differences in the conditions used by different investigators. Pick up issues of Science, Nature or other scientific journals, and you will see an extensive and healthy correspondence about experiments, their interpretation and reproducibility.
Political hay surrounds the premise--which will be proven false--that scientific fraud is more than a rare anomaly, that scientists are not to be trusted, and therefore that any scientific result can be challenged. The goal of those who promote this premise is often painfully obvious. Maybe it is time to give scientists a break and to recognize that as a group they have high standards of honesty, possibly higher than their accusers.
HOWARD D. LIPSHITZ Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Biology
Caltech
