|
|
| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
Dan Charles [Host]: This is TALK OF THE NATION SCIENCE FRIDAY and I’m Dan Charles sitting in for Ira Flatow…[guests are] Daniel Kevles, Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and author, The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character.
Daniel Kevles: Thank you very much. It’s good to be with you.
Charles: And Dan Greenberg is a syndicated columnist and a visiting scholar in the history of science, medicine and technology at Johns Hopkins University. He joins me from the NPR studios in Washington.
Dan Greenberg: Pleased to join you, Dan.
Charles: It’s a long story, Daniel Kevles. If you could try to summarize it briefly. What went on here?
Kevles: I should say that it started with the allegations by Margot O’Toole that Imanishi-Kari’s data did not support one of the central claims of the paper published in Cell in 1986. She brought it to her mentors at Tufts. They investigated and found minor errors in the paper but no evidence of broader misconduct. Same thing happened with a subsequent investigation at MIT. But then another product of Imanishi-Kari’s lab named Charles Maplethorpe brought it to the attention of Walter Stewart and Ned Feder at the National Institutes of Health. They were increasingly involved in the issue of trying to find out the frequency of scientific fraud and misconduct and calling attention to allegations of and then testing some of these allegations themselves. And they took up this matter. I won’t go into long and involved details of how they did it. We can turn it out later if you’d like. But eventually in late ’87 or early ’88 they brought it to the attention of the staff of Congressman Dingell, John Dingell, who was chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has authorization power over the budget and activities of NIH. He and his staff were growing increasingly concerned about the question of scientific fraud and misconduct and I think they had every legitimate right to be concerned. The evidence that this problem existed, even if it was rare, increasingly was cropping up. The university community and the academic leadership of the country, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, in my view were dilatory in their response to it. And Dingell decided to investigate it. I think he went about it in an unfair and inappropriately prosecutorial fashion, and we can come back to that later. There were hearings held in April of ’88 at which Stewart, Feder, O’Toole, one other person testified. I thought they were very unfair because none of the co-authors of the paper was asked to testify, and that’s where the first charge of fraud surfaced publicly. There were additional hearings over—a little over a year later. The coauthors did get a chance to respond and it produced a highly charged face-off between David Baltimore and Congressman Dingell. Around the same time, largely under pressure from Congressman Dingell, the National Institutes of Health established a national agency, the Office of Scientific Integrity, in order to investigate these allegations. And one of the cases they had to deal with right away and they knew that they had to do it was The Baltimore Case. They did pursue this investigation, they did it in ways that seem to me, again, to be highly unfair, basically not only with regard to the rights of Imanishi-Kari, but also with regard to how you establish a process that arrives its some reasonable degree of truth about the matter. The major problem was that they denied Imanishi-Kari due process. She was not allowed to see and examine the evidence against her. She wasn’t allowed to cross-examine the witnesses against her, or bring experts to bear on the issue of her own. Nevertheless, or be that as it may, in March ’91 the Office of Scientific Integrity produced a draft report which was marked confidential on almost every one of its 200-some pages. And the idea was that Imanishi-Kari now seeing the charges at least, if not the evidence, would be able to respond and then the Office of Scientific Integrity would produce a final report subject to her appeal. Unfortunately, the draft report was leaked and it was—the issue then exploded all over the press, and the draft report said that Imanishi-Kari was guilty of fraud on a number of counts. It also excoriated David Baltimore for not doing more to get to the bottom of the case and for having defended her. And there was enormous amount of press reaction and a lot of people in the press took this report as conclusive, which it was not; it was only tentative and a draft.
Charles: Dan Greenberg got a copy of that report, I think, before I did. Your book in a sense talks about Dan Greenberg’s coverage as an example of what you call a travesty. Whose fault is that?
Kevles: I didn’t use the word, I think, in regard to Mr. Greenberg. I had long read Mr. Greenberg’s work and profited from it, but I think that on this case that he has something to account for. I think that he took the view uncritically advanced by the members of Congressman Dingell’s staff and he took as a kind of final word the information—I mean the conclusions of the draft report. He castigated David Baltimore. And at one point he said the mystery is why David Baltimore kept on defending Imanishi-Kari, and he didn’t consider the fact that maybe David Baltimore thought deeply that she was innocent. He also attacked Imanishi-Kari’s lawyer, Bruce Singal, for dealing in what he basically called legalisms or setting up some kind of legal smoke screen, because Singal wanted to and kept insisting on the need for Imanishi-Kari to see the evidence that the Secret Service had developed against her. And Mr. Greenberg seemed indifferent to the fact that she couldn’t respond to evidence that she couldn’t get. And so he took the Secret Service evidence and conclusions of the OSI as conclusive. I don’t know why he did that…
Charles: Well, let’s ask Dan Greenberg…
Greenberg: You got the right person here to respond to all that. We were not writing history. We were writing about a rather highly charged event as it came along. When the report came out and we tried to get responses from people on the other side, people who were criticized in the report, it was very difficult to reach them, very difficult to elicit any kind of response from them. So we put out the report in our newsletter. Journalism works one step at a time. Dr. Kevles has come out with his book 10 years after the event. We were writing about this two days after the event. We published the report that served a useful public service, and then the next step was to try to get a response, and it was very, very difficult. Baltimore usually wouldn’t respond, his attorney was unresponsive, Imanishi-Kari wouldn’t be responsive. We were doing our part. And I’ve got no apologies to make for it and would certainly do it all over again. That’s the role of the press. You develop the news as it comes along.
Kevles: I don’t want to get into a cat fight with Mr. Greenberg. I just think that it is incumbent upon the press to find out what kind of document they’ve got and to take into account the fact that—which would have been evident if they just asked the Office of Scientific Integrity [if] this [was] a draft report to which Imanishi-Kari did not have an opportunity to respond. That’s part of the responsibility of journalism; that’s not just history.
Greenberg: Well, Dan, my first response from David Baltimore when this case arose and I called him up and I said, “David, what’s going on?” His response, and I remember it very clearly was, “Nothing, it’s just a hysterical graduate student.” I think it was a great deal more than that and I think that was a misleading response and I think there were a great many attempts made to mislead the press along the way.
Charles: Let’s go to callers at this point. Let’s go to Phil in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Caller: Thank you. Interesting show, interesting panel. I was the reporter for The New York Times who covered The Baltimore Case and I wanted to say something about what Dan Kevles had said earlier.
Charles: If you’re identifying yourself, let’s identify your full name then.
Caller: It’s Philip Hilts. It’s even more difficult than Dan Kevles had said. He had said that a reporter should try to look into the report that they’re reporting on. In fact we did do that. We spent weeks going to all the original data. We went much farther than Kevles himself ever went in examining the original data and so on. And we did report on it extensively all the way up to the end. And Kevles himself never did that kind of work, never did interview any of us who did the basic work on it. And it’s still a tough political football on the question of whether she was innocent or guilty. I mean there’s kind of an assumption going on in the discussion that she was ultimately found innocent, and I don’t think that’s the case. I think it was a case in the end that the lawyers resolved what they were going to find out and the actual data kind of got lost. So what you have is a process from the beginning, even to ten years later when Kevles is trying to looking into it, you know, in retrospect it’s still very difficult to find out the actual facts and what really happened and who did what to whom.
Charles: We’re getting a little bit more into personal attacks here than I counted on.
Kevles: You have to give me a chance to respond, Dan, don’t you?
Charles: Yeah, well, sure. Well, what’s the—I don’t know on what basis we decide who looked into this most thoroughly. Mr. Kevles’s book has a hundred pages of footnotes, I guess that counts for something. Daniel Kevles.
Kevles: Well, just briefly, I read Mr. Hilts’ reports of the case very carefully, I think I found all of them. Maybe I missed one or two.
Caller: But you didn’t call.
Kevles: No, I didn’t call you because you gave no evidence in the stories that you had examined the data and the story you published on Imanishi-Kari in June of 1991 was filled with certain errors, important ones about the nature of the experiment.
Caller: And if you thought so, why didn’t you call?
Kevles: And in addition, you published an article—and in addition…
Caller: I’m just trying to point out that…
Kevles: I could point to other misrepresentations that you published.
Caller: But you didn’t call. You thought there were misrepresentations but you didn’t call.
Kevles: But the important point is that—if I may finish, please, Mr. Hilts—the important point is, as Dan Charles points out, my book is heavily documented. I went over an enormous amount of data, including a great deal of the original notebooks, as well as the evidence in the appeals hearing. And if you want to judge for yourselves whether Imanishi-Kari was guilty or not I suggest you at least read the book.
Charles: Well, it sounds like this is not going to be the final word on the case.
Greenberg: Can I interject a word here? I don’t know whether the book is heavily documented. It’s filled with footnotes, but the footnotes often don’t really support some of the material that’s in the text. I find it quite extraordinary that Dr. Kevles apparently relied on a great deal that I wrote about the case because I was writing about the case from day one right up to the end and even beyond that. He never once spoke to me. Now, as far as, you know, journalistic and scholarly techniques are concerned, it seems to me that’s no way to go about it.
Charles: OK. Well, let’s move on…One thing that struck me in looking through The Baltimore Case was both sides at least seemed to be—well, they were certainly saying that they were struggling for the soul of science or to save science, to preserve something valuable in the scientific tradition. Were they both wrong or did that add fuel to the fire that was in the end, I don’t know, perhaps unproductive? What do you think? Dan Greenberg.
Greenberg: I think they both sincerely believed that they were the guardians of the soul of science and each one regarded the other as being detrimental to good values and science. How one sorts that out I think depends on who you think was the villain in the case, whether it was Margot O’Toole, who blew the whistle, or it was David Baltimore and his colleague Imanishi-Kari. The soul of science is a very, very elusive element and nobody has actually pinned it down. And I don’t think it could be very fruitful to pursue, you know, this line of inquiry about who would have been better for the soul of science.
Kevles: I’d just like to say that I don’t think of Margot O’Toole as a villain, I’ve not tried to portray her that way. I believe that she truly believed what she said when she said. I think the problem was how the mechanisms within the system responded to her.
Charles: Daniel Kevles, the Koepfli professor of the humanities at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. His latest book is The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character, published by Norton. And Dan Greenberg, a syndicated columnist and a visiting scholar in the history of science, medicine and technology at Johns Hopkins University. Thanks to all of you for joining me here today.
Scientific Misconduct, NPR Talk Of the Nation, October 2, 1998. © 1998 National Public Radio, Inc.