From the Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2006:
TRIALS & ERRORS
Barely a Drop of Fraud
Why It Shouldn't Taint Our View of Science
By Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles
Sunday, January 8, 2006; Page B03
Seldom in our history have fame, fortune or a heady mix of the two
tempted so many people into committing fraud. The halls of Congress
are reverberating with the jingle of hastily discarded donations as
elected officials distance themselves from lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Onetime employees have not forgotten Enron, WorldCom and the giant
compensation packages of failed CEOs.
No surprise, then, that South Korean biologist Hwang Woo Suk, the
putative creator of Snuppy, the first cloned dog, should come to
occupy the spotlight of suspicion. There is doubtless a sense of
schadenfreude among people envious of -- and at the same time fearful
of -- scientists whose work they only partially understand but
nonetheless depend on. Some are even asking whether biomedical
research can be trusted.
But the specter of a cloud of fraud hanging over the microscopes and
telescopes of scientists around the world is largely imaginary. It is
true that there have been some great scientific misdeeds in the past.
Who can forget Piltdown Man , the manufactured fossil skull that
puzzled anthropologists for decades? Or the claims of the discovery
of cold fusion in 1989 at the University of Utah? But those examples
are famous because they are so rare. And, as the South Korean stem
cell case shows, the scientific process means that frauds are
typically revealed before they harm anything but the reputations of
the perpetrators themselves. The far greater risk is that they erode
our faith in science.
After all, the vast majority of scientific research is honest. True
enough, laboratories such as Hwang's are filled with men and women as
eager as the rest of us for fortune and fame. In their case, fortune
can range from the renewal of grant money (many U.S medical
researchers depend entirely on this rather than salaries) or
financial gain in the form of patents or stock options. For a special
few, fame can mean Nobel Prizes. But the risks of fraud are very
great as well. The taint of cheating can end a career in science in a
single blow.
The world of science is also intensely competitive, and there is a
certain satisfaction within the scientific community when the
spotlight of suspicion falls on a superstar like Hwang. He had
enjoyed the kind of meteoric rise that most only dream of. A
veterinary researcher at Seoul National University, Hwang won
attention in 2004 for a paper in the pages of Science, the
prestigious journal of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, documenting the first therapeutic cloning of new lines of
stem cells from human embryos. Within a year, Hwang reported the
cloning of Snuppy in the British journal Nature.
These accomplishments made Hwang a hero in his home country, and his
laboratory received millions in government funds. But almost as
rapidly as his star had risen, his work was targeted by investigative
reporters from a Korean television network, and a Korean scientific
Web site uncovered false claims in his articles. Alerted to the
irregularities, Hwang's American co-author, Gerald Schatten of the
University of Pittsburgh Medical School, terminated his collaboration
and later asked that his name be removed from the papers. Hwang,
suffering from stress, announced he was retracting the Science paper
but maintained that his work was basically sound.
So there it stands. Hwang has suggested that someone, perhaps an
assistant who had left his lab to take a job in Pittsburgh, may have
switched the samples that were tested, and that he had, as he
asserted at first, achieved the cloning. The issue is still muddled
but what is clear is that in less than two years since Hwang made his
claims, this case of scientific fraud has come to dominate headlines.
In the international field of stem cell research, controversy mounts
upon controversy. First, there is the question of the efficacy of the
peer review system, in which a journal's editor sends a paper to
authorities in a field who decide if the work is original and
valuable. Less visible in this instance is the nature of the research
itself, which some scientists oppose on moral grounds. The cascading
series of accusations runs the gamut from questions about the source
of the human eggs and the technique used to create -- if Hwang
actually did -- new stem cell colonies.
These experiments occurred outside the circle of Western science,
raising questions, too, about the regulation of research elsewhere.
There are thousands of scientists working in Asia, many of whom,
unlike Hwang, were trained in the United States. There are also more
scientific journals than ever before (although the journals Hwang
published in are the oldest and most respected of them all). While
everyone in the field agrees that the experiments have to be
confirmed, they do not agree that the review process was inadequate.
They suggest that the system does work because, with these results
under suspicion, efforts will soon be made to replicate Hwang's
techniques. To suggest, as has been done, that the global spread of
science, and of scientific error, accidental or deliberate, is due to
the non-Western scene of the alleged crime smacks of racism. The real
significance lies in the swift action of the Korean press in exposing
the irregularities in the paper and in the procedures used to procure
the human eggs -- and that this happened before damage extended
beyond the reputations of the scientists involved.
Similarly, the Piltdown hoax, which was revealed decades after the
manipulated skull's supposed discovery, caused no collateral damage.
Paleontology, a historical science, did not have an immediate impact
on contemporary physics or medicine. And cold fusion was swiftly
debunked, which kept its costs confined to the state of Utah.
Biomedicine became a target of investigation after the cornucopia of
possibility opened by the discovery of DNA in 1953. Laboratories
flourished and hanky-panky was discovered first in 1974, when William
Summerlin, a physician working at Sloan-Kettering in New York,
reported that tissue kept in organ culture for a period of time could
be transplanted without rejection. To prove his point, he used a
black marking pen to doctor the backs of two white mice. When the
mice were later examined, Summerlin admitted the fraud and took a
recommended medical leave of absence. Then, in 1981, John R. Darsee,
a cardiology researcher at Harvard, was secretly observed by
suspicious colleagues blatantly forging raw data. The National
Institutes of Health later concluded that Darsee had committed
multiple fakeries, and in 1983, at age 34, Darsee was banned from
eligibility for grants for 10 years.
With the global proliferation of biomedical research, there may be
other incidents like the ones involving Darsee and Summerlin, and
most likely the inability to replicate the doctored claims will
gainsay the research. As for the Korean stem cells, the experiment
has not been replicated, and its claims have not changed the
direction of research.
Much of the public believes that science is the best guide to
understanding what is happening in our increasingly interconnected
world. Whether they believe in evolutionary theory or not, people
know that viruses from birds change and can become lethal to human
beings, and everyone hopes that science can devise a way to protect
us from a pandemic. Medical research in the United States can save
lives in India, and stem cells in Korea may help treat Parkinson's
victims in France.
Accepting scientific evidence means more than cheering medical
progress. It is vital to pay attention to the icebergs melting at
both magnetic poles, which signals changes in the flow of the Gulf
Stream, for example. When cries of fraud clump all scientific
research into doubt, it raises the risk that real science, good
science, will be disregarded -- and our descendants may suffer in
ways we can too well imagine.
Author's e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles is a lecturer in history at Yale University
and the author of "Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space" (MIT Press).
