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| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
by Howard J. Lewis
David L. Hull, Dressler Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, writing in the December 3 issue of The New York Review of Books, called it “the biggest controversy over fraud and accuracy [in science] that we have ever known.” It certainly had one of the largest casts—pitting Nobel laureate against Nobel laureate, a major government agency against a powerful committee of the Congress, and scientific journals against each other and sometimes against the news media [See ScienceWriters, Summer 1996].
Central to the decade-long imbroglio that came to be known as “The Baltimore Case” was Nobel laureate David Baltimore’s stonewall defense of his colleague, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, against charges of scientific fraud brought by a junior member of the research team, Margot O’Toole. Both Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari were among six authors of a scientific paper on immunoglobulin gene expression in transgenic mice published in the April 25, 1986 issue of Cell. The principal character elements among the players on the research side were Baltimore’s haughty response to criticism, Imanishi-Kari’s disorderly work habits, and O’Toole’s appealing demeanor. Also prominent in the plot development were Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and, significantly, chairman of the subcommittee on oversight and investigation; and a curious pair of Nosy Parkers on the staff of the National Institutes of Health named Walter Stewart and Ned Feder.
In brief, O’Toole’s charges of flawed findings in the Cell paper—initially dismissed by academic panels—later came to sway several groups within NIH, some appointed by management, others self-selected by their fascination with scientific skullduggery. Dingell entered upon the stage when committee staff, on the prowl for evidence of scientific fraud, were made aware of O’Toole’s charges. In O’Toole’s testimony and later in a draft report of an NIH investigative office and a subsequent FBI analysis of Imanishi-Kari’s laboratory reports, Dingell found more than enough grist—not only for his mill, but also for reporters impressed by the apparent evidence of scientific fraud at the highest possible level. Baltimore was a Nobel laureate who was accused of being party to doctoring evidence to support a flawed conclusion; he was publicly censured by a former colleague, Walter Gilbert, also a Nobel laureate.
In time, Baltimore felt obliged to resign the presidency of The Rockefeller University, a position to which he had been elevated only 18 months previously. Then, like a Greek tragedy in reverse, new management at NIH re-examined the procedures that had produced earlier censure and found a serious want of procedural fairness, such as the right to be informed of charges and opportunity to confront them. The flow of privileged information from NIH to the Congress came to an end and in 1996, a scientific review board exonerated Imanishi-Kari of fabricating evidence and then in 1997, the circle returned to its beginning with the appointment of Baltimore as president of the California Institute of Technology.
End of story? Not quite. The
Baltimore Case is now the title of a book by Daniel Kevles,
also a Professor of Humanities, but at Caltech. Published by W.
W. Norton this past September, The Baltimore Case won highly
favorable reviews in several major newspapers, including The Wall
Street Journal and both the daily and Sunday New York Times.
The 509-page book is firmly in the Baltimore-Imanishi-Kari camp,
celebrating their vindication and scolding their tormentors, including
those in the news media who are accused of (1) rushing to judgment
and (2) serving as eager consumers of partisan leaks from the
Dingell staff and O’Toole sympathizers at NIH.
The fundamental leak was a report of the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), established in response to earlier charges of fraudulence in NIH-supported studies. OSI’s examination of the charges aired by O’Toole resulted in a draft report highly critical of Imanishi-Kari’s work in the study. Two members of the authoring panel supplied a minority view that was included in the draft report but not listed in its table of contents. On March 14, 1991, copies of the draft report went to the principal authors and to members of the scientific panel. Somehow a copy also found its way to the office of Congressman Dingell.
According to Kevles, a copy was sent overnight to a Washington Post editor and turned over next day to reporter Malcolm Gladwell with the advice that it had been sent by Stewart and Feder. Kevles wrote: “In a telephone conversation with one of the pair, Gladwell learned that they had sent the report together with the kit of background articles to a number of press organizations across the country. The next day it was page-one news that the OSI had found Thereza Imanishi-Kari, the collaborator whom the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore had defended, guilty of fraud.”
Kevles makes plain his distaste
for the uncritical way the media (including both Nature
and Science) responded to the OSI draft report and earlier
leaks from NIH sources and/or the Dingell subcommittee.
The leak decisively fixed the impression of the case in the public mind. In the several weeks following the initial release of the document, Imanishi-Kari was unquestioningly taken to be guilty in newspapers, on National Public Radio, and, in Boston, on a broadcast of the widely watched “Ten O’Clock News” that featured an interview with Margot O’Toole. The Wall Street Journal complained that reporters had wolfed down what had been served them “like a Domino’s pizza.”
Kevles finds much to criticize in the press coverage, particularly in what he called an unquestioning acceptance of O’Toole’s version of the argument, surely advanced by her “soft-spoken, measured and resolute articulateness.” He quotes Anthony Gottlieb,Daniel J. Kevlesscience editor on The Economist, who, in a television interview, declared that he had been “extraordinarily impressed by her honesty… Whenever it was possible to check anything she said, it was exactly right…She struck me as a person who would very rarely exaggerate and who would attempt to be precise and as honest as possible.”
Kevles’ survey of media coverage
finds little to praise: David Warsh of the Boston Globe stood
by Baltimore and against Dingell and his “thuggish congressional
behavior,” as did The Wall Street Journal, but “most
columnists and editorialists,” Kevles complains, “lambasted
Baltimore for wronging O’Toole—and for a good deal more.”
His list of individuals and publications he found too ready to
convict includes Time magazine and both Nature and
Science, but Daniel Greenberg, then editor of Science
and Government Report, and Philip Hilts and Philip Boffey
of The New York Times are singled out for particular disapproval—Greenberg
for serving as an overly credulous partisan of Dingell, Stewart,
and Feder; Hilts for what Kevles suggests was an overreliance
on the prejudicial views of Walter Gilbert and Mark Ptashne, both
former colleagues of Baltimore; and Boffey for a New York Times
editorial characterizing the whole affair as a “scientific
Watergate.”
If the role of the news media seemed central to The Baltimore Case, perhaps it was only to someone directly involved. Neither of the two reviews in The New York Times mentioned the role of the press, nor did a later review in The Washington Post. But (surprise!) the role of the news media was significant in the review by conservative columnist Paul Gigot in The Wall Street Journal. He wrote:
Unfortunately, Mr. Kevles overlooks the revealing ideological alliances that formed in this case. Mr. Baltimore led antiwar protests in the 1960s and called SDI a “cruel hoax” in the 1980s. Yet his only media defenders against John Dingell were conservatives at this newspaper. Most other journalists took their cues from the Times.
Has The Baltimore Case now been put to rest? Not quite. In response to the book’s publication, Ira Flatow’s Science Friday on National Public Radio broadcast on October 2 a discussion of the book featuring a debate between Daniel Kevles and Daniel Greenberg. With permission of NPR, a considerable portion of the transcript follows, including not only the two principals but also a surprise call-in. The text strongly suggests that sorting out the elements of a shrouded controversy is a lot easier for historians than for journalists.
[Two other items broadcast over National Public Radio invited publication in this issue of ScienceWriters— a pointed commentary from Richard Harris on NASA’s “mastery of the media” in preparation for the John Glenn flight and some elegant mash notes about science first editions from a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Research and Training that was broadcast over NPR on the October 24 Saturday Morning Edition. Consider them a salute to Harris’s two years as NASW president, his extraordinary efforts to update its constitution and to his successor, Joe Palca, also of NPR.]
Photo of Daniel J. Kevles by Betty Ann Holtmann Kevles