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| Volume 46, Number 3, Winter 1998-99 |
Apropos the exchange on Science Friday concerning media coverage of the Baltimore case, an excerpt of which appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of SW: The lack of the historian’s leisurely distance from the events seems an inadequate explanation for how Dan Greenberg and Philip Hilts often reported them. The plain fact is that neither treated the case evenhandedly.
In 1990, Greenberg described the case as “a mini-Watergate” and attacked David Baltimore for having “orchestrated and led a national campaign to depict Dingell as an anti-science McCarthyite.”1 After the draft report by the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) was leaked in March 1991, he praised Imanishi-Kari’s accusers and declared Dingell “vindicated” even though Thereza Imanishi-Kari had not been given a fair chance to respond to the report.2 The principal obstacle that she faced throughout the investigations by the Dingell subcommittee and the OSI was denial of elemental due process—denial of the right to see the evidence advanced against her by her accusers and the Secret Service and to cross-examine the witnesses against her. Her lawyer complained about this repeatedly, but Greenberg dismissed the issue, calling it at one point merely “a legalistic wile designed to bog the inquiry in endless disputes about whether all the sought-after information had actually been provided.”3 In November 1991, he wrote that Imanishi-Kari’s “blatant commission of scientific fraud” had been documented by the OSI “fairly or not” [emphasis added] and that Baltimore’s “friends” were only spreading “heavy smoke” around her sin by “pounding on the due process issue.”4
Hugh McDevitt, an immunologist on the faculty of the Stanford Medical School and one of the experts who advised the OSI, recalls that Hilts telephoned him when the draft report was leaked. Hilts seemed “convinced that Thereza was guilty and Baltimore was terrible,” McDevitt declares, adding, “He kept focusing on Baltimore. I said, ‘Why do you guys want to pillory David?’ He said, ‘Because he’s so arrogant.’”5 In an article about Imanishi-Kari published in the New York Times in June 1991, Hilts misrepresented crucial issues in the disputed experiment in a way that worked against Imanishi-Kari. In May 1992 he published a piece in the New Republic that was riddled with errors, all of which tended to reinforce his principal claim: “David Baltimore clearly failed as a scientist—through his carelessness, his willful oversight, and his extraordinary attempts to protect his own reputation at the expense of a conscientious young colleague.”6 Now, on NPR’s Science Friday, Hilts holds that “it’s still a tough political football on the question of whether she [Imanishi-Kari] was innocent or guilty,” adding that “the lawyers resolved what they were going to find out and the actual [laboratory] data kind of got lost.”7 Hilts refers here to Imanishi-Kari’s hearing before the Departmental Appeals Board in 1995, a procedure that afforded her full due-process rights for the first time. The board’s decision exonerating Imanishi-Kari runs to 183 single-spaced, heavily footnoted pages. You don’t need the advantage of historical hindsight to recognize from this document that the board paid considerable attention to the data. You only need 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.
Daniel J. Kevles
Pasadena, California
1“Misconduct
Update: Slow Progress on Big Cases,” Science and Government
Report, Oct. 1, 1990, p. 3.
2“Dingell Sounds Off on Indirect Costs, Scientific
Fraud,” Ibid, May 15, 1991, pp. 1,4.
3“Secret Service Says Data Faked in Baltimore Case,”
Ibid., May 15, 1990, p.1.
4“N.I.H.’s Bungling Goes on in the Baltimore
Case,” Ibid., Sept. 15, 1991, pp. 3-4.
5Author’s interview with McDevitt, July 2, 1996.
6Hilts, “‘I am Innocent,’Embattled Biologist
Says,” New York Times, June 4, 1991, pp. C7, C10;
“The Science Mob,” New Republic, May 18, 1992,
pp. 24-31.
7SW, Fall 1998, pp. 4-5.
I enjoyed the Anaheim NASW workshop on embargoes. I think journal editors, public-information officers, and science writers all came away with a better understanding of how the embargo system works (how it should work, anyway), who it benefits, and why it’s worth preserving. But the workshop was preaching to the choir. The people who most need a better understanding of embargoes— scientists—weren’t present. I think we need a follow-up workshop or a plenary session on embargoes at a future AAAS meeting, and that NASW members and especially scientists should be encouraged to attend.
Here’s an example of why I believe scientists need “embargo enlightenment.” My sister-in-law is a psychologist studying the effects of childcare on the relationships between mothers and their children. She and her colleagues came to the Anaheim AAAS meeting to present their latest findings in a symposium. The AAAS News & Information Office scheduled a press briefing on the topic too. But just before the meeting the paper on which the presentations were to be based was accepted by the American Journal of Public Health. The journal embargoes accepted papers until they are published.
“We were looking forward to getting [our results] out at the conference,” my sister-in-law told me in an e-mail message. “I guess it’s a good thing we heard of the paper’s acceptance before we presented the findings. I don’t think we had considered this sort of conflict.” I suggested she could play by the embargo rules by presenting her paper in the symposium but withholding it from the press briefing (advice borne out at the NASW workshop), but my sister-in-law didn’t have time to sort this out before the meeting and in the end did not present the embargoed paper at all.
After the meeting she sent me a copy of the American Journal of Public Health embargo policy. It states, in part, “Please remember that the results of your paper are embargoed and must not be released to the press prior to publication; however, presentation of the results to peers at scientific meetings is permissible.” While the AAAS is a scientific venue, my sister-in-law and her colleagues concluded they should not present at the AAAS meeting because of the large number of reporters who attend.
This is a case where an embargo policy inhibited communication among scientists, however unintentionally.
I think the NASW could provide a real service to the community of scientists and our own community of science writers by working with journal editors and public-information officers to develop clear and unambiguous embargo-policy language and facilitating its widespread dissemination.
Imagine how much simpler life would be if every journal had a statement in the same format that answered the questions, “Do you accept papers that have been presented at scientific meetings?” “What if those meetings are open to reporters?” “Do you accept papers that have been posted to an on-line preprint server?” “May I talk about my soon-to-be-published paper at a scientific meeting?” “If so, what should I do, or not do, if a reporter asks follow-up questions?”
Some journal embargo policies do answer some of these questions, but most are just plain confusing. While journals with embargo policies usually invite authors to contact the editors if they have questions, in my experience most scientists, ever mindful of the “publish or perish” mentality of academia, simply clam up at any mention of an embargo. When this happens, everybody loses. That’s not helpful in a system ostensibly designed to let everybody win.
Richard Tresch Fienberg
President/Publisher
SKY & TELESCOPE