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| Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 1999 |
In a letter in the Winter 1998-99 SW, Professor Daniel K. Kevles, author of The Baltimore Case, contends the case was not treated "evenhandedly" in my reports in Science & Government Report. He complains that I described the case as a "mini-Watergate," and that I "attacked David Baltimore for having 'orchestrated and led a national campaign to depict [Rep.] John Dingell as an anti-science McCarthyite.'"
As Kevles surely knows, "Watergate," and derivations, is in common usage as shorthand for misbehavior in high places, as in "Travelgate," "Koreagate," even "Monica- gate." It is trite, but as modified to "mini-Watergate" it was appropriate, given that the case became a cause celebre after government investigators reported serious deficiencies in the research paper in question and several pillars of the science establishment deplored Baltimore's uncooperative response to criticism. Paul Doty of Harvard, accused Baltimore of an "egregious departure from the usual standards of carrying out and reporting research." NIH Director James Wyngaarden admonished Baltimore for being unresponsive to criticism.
After defending the paper and his co-author, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, Baltimore reversed course in Nature of May 9, 1991, stating that "I was too willing to accept Imanishi-Kari's explanations, and to excuse discrepancies as mere sloppiness." He later retracted the disputed research paper, citing "questions raised about the validity of certain data in the paper."
Kevles complains that following Baltimore's retraction, I wrote that Dingell was "vindicated." As of that time, Dingell was vindicated, as I and others correctly reported. By retracting the paper, Baltimore accepted criticisms of the paper, thus vindicating Dingell. When Baltimore later reversed course once again, and retracted the retraction, I and others reported Baltimore's latest twists and turns. That's the news business; it tracks life.
Kevles criticizes me for publishing confidential government reports of the Baltimore inquiry. I plead guilty. Kevles surely understands that a constitutionally protected function of the press is to report on government-without first obtaining the permission of government. As for not obtaining responses from Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari: It was not for lack of trying. They were unreachable behind teams of attorneys and flacks who routinely stonewalled press inquiries.
Regarding efforts by Baltimore and colleagues to depict Dingell as an "anti-science McCarthyite": In 1988, in a nine-page letter to hundreds of scientists around the country, Baltimore attacked Dingell's investigation as "a harbinger of threats to scientific communication and scientific freedom." Daniel E. Koshland Jr., editor of Science, attacked press coverage of the case, writing: "The late Senator Joseph McCarthy was particularly clever at manipulating journalists in this way; the techniques should be familiar by now." In 1989, a nationwide appeal for scientists to defend Baltimore was organized by Phillip A. Sharp, an MIT colleague of Baltimore's. Among its products was an AP feature that began: "A noted pediatrician says his patients will suffer and die because of attacks by a powerful congressman on the work of a Nobel Prize-winning researcher."
Finally, Kevles disapprovingly quotes me as writing that Imanishi-Kari's "blatant commission of scientific fraud" had been documented by OSI [Office of Scientific Integrity] "fairly or not" [Kevles's italics], thus suggesting an indifference on my part to fairness. The full passage from which Kevles drew his snippets of quotation clearly conveys a different meaning.
Reporting events in 1991, it states that "Baltimore and company launched a new attack, this one riding the contention that the NIH investigative procedures were deficient in due process. Whether or not that's the case will surely come to court someday, but there is no doubt that, fairly or not, OSI's investigators documented a blatant commission of scientific fraud by Imanishi-Kari."
Kevles's unbalanced book on the Baltimore case was dismembered by C.K. Gunsalus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the New England Journal of Medicine (January 21, 1999). Gunsalus, an attorney experienced in issues of scientific misconduct, carried out a laborious, valuable task: she checked Kevles's end notes, which cover 92 pages. Gunsalus concludes that the "end notes do not fully support his assertions." After providing damning examples, Gunsalus concludes: "Of even greater concern is Kevles's seeming willingness to gloss over (or deny) documented facts."
Kevles's book purports to be a history of the Baltimore case (in which only Imanishi-Kari was charged with misconduct, while Nobel laureate Baltimore, her co-author, became her prominent defender). The book is actually a blinkered apologia, largely focused on matters favorable to Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari. As noted in an otherwise favorable review by Baruch A. Brody of Baylor College of Medicine in JAMA (April 21, 1999), "Kevles is not as clear as he might have been that Imanishi-Kari was not exonerated; the final review only concluded that the case against her had not been adequately proven by a preponderance of the evidence."
On the absence of exoneration, David Hull, writing in the New York Review of Books (December 3, 1998), observes that "it is a shame that [Kevles] passes so quickly over this point."
Hull adds that "not being able to prove that someone is guilty is not the same as their being innocent." It should be noted, too, that a bumbling presentation by the government was no match for Imanishi-Kari's high-priced legal team.
In concluding his letter, Kevles endorses "an open mind, balanced judgment, and the scrupulous respect for evidence that is the hallmark of the work of historians and journalists at their best." Indeed.
I attended the NASW session on embargoes in Anaheim and read your follow-up article in ScienceWriters (Winter 1998-99). It seems to me that one element has been missing from this passionate discussion: input from journals that do not embargo papers or press releases about their papers. Indeed, the most distressing part of the debate to me is the implicit assumption that embargoes should be the norm rather than the exception. There are actually quite a number of unembargoed peer-reviewed journals, including those published by the American Geophysical Union, including Geophysical Research Letters and the Journal of Geophysical Research.
We routinely send advance highlights of Geophysical Research Letters to a list of over 100 journalists and public information officers who have specifically asked to receive them, and we send press releases on individual papers from various journals to a much larger list. Preprints of the full papers are always available upon request. We have had good success in getting research we have published into both specialized and mass circulation media, and no journalist has complained to me about AGU's immediate release policy.
These facts would seem to contradict one of the key arguments used by journals that routinely embargo papers until their day of publication: that the embargo provides a level playing field for writers who wish to do additional research or interviews without being scooped by those who do not. (Of course, speaking of a scoop with regard to material available to thousands of writers via a press release stretches the meaning of the term quite far.) Those interviews can be conducted quickly by phone or e-mail. In fact, some papers even hold previously embargoed stories for the following week's science section, so the fear of being scooped by other media seems not to be a major argument in favor of embargoes. Similarly, AGU journal stories often appear in various media over a period of several days or even weeks, both before and after the cover date of the journal, with no apparent harmful impact either on AGU or the media.
Would we achieve even greater placement by imposing an artificial (because unnecessary) embargo? Do some journalists assume an unembargoed press release must be less worthy than an embargoed one, as has been suggested? These are interesting questions. What does approximate an uneven playing field, perhaps, is the apparent practice of some newspapers to reserve space for items from particular journals that they know will be available, thanks to embargoed press releases, on the same day every week. That bias toward the predictable makes it more difficult for other journals whose unembargoed press releases are issued sporadically to break into the science page or even the general news pages. Since both Monica Bradford and Laura Garwin acknowledged at NASW that their journals' commercial interests were as important as the science writers' playing field in instituting and enforcing their embargo policies, one could hope that this space allocation should not be quite so automatic.
The debate will go on. I just seek to broaden its scope and question some assumptions.