In Review: June 9, 1999
When scientists are accused
Was it falsification or misinterpretation?
The Baltimore Case
Daniel J. Kevles '60 *64
W.W. Norton
$29.95
Fraud or allegations of fraud in the field of science periodically shake
the research community. They also have an impact on the public, shocked
to learn that scientific endeavor might be polluted with forgery or lies,
and outraged that public dollars dedicated to the advancement of knowledge
and to the prospects of progress might be wasted. Among recent affairs,
the "Baltimore case" is one of special interest, because it involved
famous scientists as well as politicians and resulted in a highly publicized
and protracted affair where the accused and the accusers ended up exchanging
roles.
The scientist accused of fraud, Tereza Imanishi-Kari, was an assistant
professor at MIT whose research focused on immune cells called B lymphocytes
that produce antibodies, molecules that can kill or neutralize viruses and
bacteria. The whistle blower, Margot O'Toole, a postdoctoral fellow who
had joined Imanishi-Kari's laboratory in 1985, had come to suspect error
and then fraud because a method that was routinely used in the lab did not
work for her. Yet the validity of this method was pivotal to support the
conclusions of a paper published in 1986 by Imanishi-Kari in Cell,
a prestigious journal of biological research. The allegation of fraud was
categorically denied by Imanishi-Kari and her collaborators. Of importance
for the impact and the course of the story was the fact that it unfolded
at MIT, a prestigious research institute, and involved, as a collaborator
and coauthor of the incriminated paper, David Baltimore, one of the most
productive biologists of our time, a Nobel laureate at the age of 37 and
an outspoken scientist involved in science policy issues.
In this rather spectacular context, The Baltimore Case by Daniel
J. Kevles '60 *64 focuses on the high-profile confrontation between Baltimore,
a self-assured scientist defending his honor and that of his collaborator,
Imanishi-Kari, and Representative John D. Dingell, chairman of the House
Energy and Commerce Committee, a ferocious protector of taxpayers' money,
who took on the Imanishi-Kari case as a crusade to purify science. The book
describes the relentless anti-Baltimore campaign of some newspapers, including
The New York Times, fueled by leaks from the investigation, as well
as the condemning attitude of some prominent Harvard scientists. So overwhelming
was the campaign against him that Baltimore had to resign from his new position
as president of the Rockefeller University. Kevles analyzes in detail the
handling of the case by various institutional committees, including the
new Office of Scientific Integrity of the National Institutes of Health,
and Dingell's committee, documenting an appalling procedure whereby the
accused scientists were deprived of any due process and were refused access
to the details of the accusations. Various investigations, including that
of the FBI, were mishandled. For example, an FBI report based on forensic
examination of the ink in computer printouts from MIT, initially held as
a "scientific proof" of fraud, was later found to be scientifically
groundless.
The 10-year ordeal endured by Imanishi-Kari, and to a lesser extent Baltimore,
is reminiscent of a novel by Franz Kafka, The Trial, in which a senseless
trial is conducted against an innocent person. But this book reads in many
respects as a thriller, with heroes (the accused) and villains (the accusers),
and a lot of action and passion from various interest groups. The author,
a historian of science at Caltech, is an admirer and supporter of Baltimore.
However, he appears to be somewhat less attentive to, if not biased against,
the other side of the story, that of Margot O'Toole. An articulate and courageous
individual, she enlisted support and respect from several prominent scientists,
as well as from NIH officials and members of the Dingell committee. Yet,
on the basis of secondhand sources, her character is generally described
unfavorably. In contrast, when the author discusses the details of the published
experiments incriminated by O'Toole, he leniently treats significant errors
in the paper and some apparent data selection that only surfaced after the
investigation was initiated. For example, the investigators discovered another
version of an autoradiograph that was presented in the paper which showed
a light but somewhat embarrassing "smudge" in a chromatographic
position where, to support the central claim of the paper, there should
have been none. Despite the claim by Kevles that later studies in other
laboratories did reproduce at least part of the results and conclusions
of the Imanishi-Kari paper, none of them confirmed the central observation
reported in the paper. These studies pointed, in fact, to potential sources
of errors that might have misled Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore in their data
interpretation, and it has always been of some concern for many of their
scientific colleagues that neither one of them attempted to repeat and clarify
the experiments they had published together.
Despite these limitations, the book conveys a sense of the complexity
of the scientific practice, of the extent to which scientists need to make
subjective judgments when interpreting or organizing the data generated
by their experiments, and of the various implications associated with the
publication of a scientific paper. It also illustrates how individual and
sometimes irreconcilable are the attitudes of scientists confronted with
these issues, and how fuzzy the boundaries between a truthful report and
an outright fraud can be. After 10 years of accusations, without grant money
to continue her research and with the support of only a few colleagues,
Imanishi-Kari was exonerated of all charges. The "Baltimore case"
will stand for some time as a benchmark for historians of science because
it vividly illustrates the practice of science, its intersection with law
and politics, and the social status of scientists at the end of this century.
-- Albert S. Bendelac
Albert S. Bendelac is an associate professor of molecular biology.
Yonkers, a town riven by race
A former reporter immerses herself in the town's saga
Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption
Lisa Belkin '82
Little, Brown, $25
In 1992, Lisa Belkin '82 returned to the New York area after spending
several years in Houston reporting for The New York Times. The move
proved to be a crossroads in her life. Belkin and her husband, a pediatric
cardiologist, settled into a new Westchester County house -- her first --
and began, as a self-described "protective new parent," to raise
a family (one son, then later a second). It was around that time that she
noticed a short item in the local newspaper about an impending lottery to
auction public-housing units that had recently been built in Yonkers, New
York.
"I knew just a little about the townhouses at the time -- that they
were ordered into existence by a federal judge so that poor, minority public
housing residents could live on the white, middle-class side of town,"
she writes in Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption.
Even when she lived in Texas, Belkin continues, "I had memories of
the nightly reports on the national news, of the hundreds of people, chanting
and screaming, faces contorted with hate. Now the housing was built. And
it was near me."
At first, Belkin recalls, she thought it would be "an interesting
magazine article." But it soon became clear that to do it right meant
immersing herself completely in the Yonkers milieu. Belkin left her job
at the Times and, other than writing freelance pieces on contract
with The New York Times Magazine, proceeded to spend the next six
years researching and writing this book.
Because Belkin came into the story after the housing project was already
under construction, she began by following several key characters, including
winners of the housing lottery, as they -- and the city -- tried to recover
from the chaos. But in 1993, only a few months into her research, Nicholas
Wasicsko -- the young Yonkers mayor who was viciously criticized for supporting
the housing project -- committed suicide. After that blow, Belkin decided
that she needed to reconstruct the events of the previous four years. Soon,
Wasicsko's doomed life became the glue that bound her book together. Although
Belkin only spoke to Wasicsko once before he died, his widow, upon reading
the galleys, said that the book made her feel as if she were in the room
with him.
"No one had done a book on Yonkers, which surprised me," Belkin
says. "I spoke to the reporters who had covered it. They were very
helpful and generous, but they said they had covered it so long that they
couldn't begin to write a book about it." Even Belkin admits to having
days when she began to doubt her own ability to finish it. "I was frustrated
if the story did not work out in the storybook manner I'd decided it should
-- but that's journalism. At first it's frustrating, and then you get over
it."
A Long Island native, Belkin as an undergraduate studied under John McPhee
'53 ("the best writing training one can get on the planet," she
says) and was features editor of The Daily Princetonian. The Prince
board that year was especially strong; it included future Washington
Post reporters Barton Gellman '82 and Joel Achenbach '82, and CNN polling
director T. Keating Holland '82. Even the Prince advertising manager,
Virginia (Inman) Postrel '82, went on to edit Reason magazine. "It
was a remarkable group of people to learn journalism from," Belkin
says.
Indeed, considering that lineup, she's "as shocked as anyone"
to still be writing for a living. After being accepted to the University
of Virginia Law School, Belkin backed out to take a job as a "clerk"
to New York Times Washington reporter Hedrick Smith. She never looked
back. Belkin was promoted to full reporter at the Times, first in
New York and then in Houston, a city that became the setting for her first
book, First, Do No Harm, (1993) about the medical profession viewed
through the prism of a hospital bioethics committee. She is now working
on a novel as well as a nonfiction book on science.
"I don't plan to get back to daily journalism now," she says.
"The way things are, I get to wrap myself around an idea for a remarkable
period of time. That is too much fun."
-- Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson is a staff correspondent for National Journal magazine.
Images from Afghanistan
When Fazal Sheikh '87 traveled in 1996 to Pakistan, the land of his
father's father, he saw that the area from which his family had emigrated
decades before had become a refugee camp for thousands who had fled the
war in neighboring Afghanistan.
Sheikh, an award-winning photographer, was moved by the refugees and
their stories, and he returned several times over the course of two years
to take pictures. In his book The Victor Weeps (Scalo, $60), Sheikh's
stirring and chilling images capture the desolation of both the landscape
and of those the war displaced.
Chiz Schultz '54 documents the
life of Paul Robeson
Film includes "extraordinary" footage of the entertainer/activist
in Russia
It's two weeks before the PBS special he is producing is set to air,
and Chiz Schultz '54 can count the hours of sleep he has had in the past
two days on the fingers of one hand. Paul Robeson: Here I Stand,
a two-hour documentary on the life of the African-American entertainer/activist,
is turning out to be harder to put together than he had expected, and he
and his team have been working around the clock to finish before the February
24 broadcast date.
The payoff, Schultz hopes, will be worth the sleepless nights. "The
footage we have is extraordinary. We have footage of Robeson from Russia
and Germany that has never been seen before -- really rare stuff. It was
hell to get."
Bringing it all together, in whatever project he gets involved in, has
been a Schultz trademark since his undergraduate days. While studying in
the then-experimental Humanities Department, Schultz was deeply involved
in Triangle and was president of Theater Intime. In the summers, he resurrected
the University Players, a project started by Jimmy Stewart '32 and Josh
Logan '31 but which had been abandoned for many years.
"Those were wonderful summers," he recalls. " We did everything
from German Expressionists to Tennessee Williams to Shakespeare and Shaw,
and we had people like Einstein and Oppenheimer come as regular patrons."
After Princeton, Schultz found work with CBS in New York City, advancing
from the mailroom -- then the traditional starting place for production
professionals -- to real production jobs, where he worked with directors
like Sidney Lumet on live television drama. Schultz then bounced out to
Hollywood, where he worked with Aaron Spelling on the production of television
shows, like the 1960s hit The Mod Squad.
After three years, Schultz was, by his own admission, "kind of sick
of Hollywood." The breaking point came one night when he went to see
Harry Belafonte play the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. He went backstage
to say hello, having worked with Belafonte in the past on a television special.
Belafonte looked at Schultz and asked him, "When are you going to
get out of this tawdry tinsel town?"
Schultz replied, "Make me an offer."
Belafonte did, and Schultz accepted, returning to New York to work for
Belafonte's production company on feature films such as Buck and the
Preacher and The Angel Levine as well as television specials,
documentaries, and other projects.
After several years with Belafonte, Schultz became program director of
the nascent Channel 13 in New York, and worked there and in other public
television positions for several years.
If his career seems a bit scattered, Schultz can only agree. He has produced
the National Geographic Explorer series for the Discovery Channel and the
children's special Crash the Curiosaurus for ABC. He has gone from
television musicals like The Judy Garland Show to A Raisin in
the Sun for American Playhouse.
"I just went back and forth," he says. "A lot of people
warned me that it would be fatal to a successful career. For a while I was
categorized as doing Hollywood stuff, and then after I worked with Belafonte
I was categorized as doing black stuff, and after that when I joined Children's
Television Workshop people said, 'Oh, he does only children's stuff.' They
like to label you. But I always liked to do what I liked to do.
"I think to a degree they were correct. My career has not been as
successful as those of people who have stayed in one place, but I prefer
the ability to do stuff I really like."
These days, the "stuff I really like" includes a lot of dramatic
work by minority writers and directors. "I'm extremely interested in
nonwhite material, and I've done so much of it primarily because there is
such a richness there and such a prejudice against doing it by the networks
and by Hollywood. As a result there is this incredibly talented group of
African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American writers, directors, and actors
who haven't had a chance. I've been fortunate enough to meet them and have
been able to get some of that stuff done."
With the Robeson piece wrapping up, Schultz is looking ahead to a half-hour
television drama written by Elmore Leonard called Security, and Diamonds
of Color, a six-hour PBS miniseries on the Negro Baseball League. But
in the immediate future, there is a slightly more pressing matter in Schultz's
life: "The only thing I can think of doing right now," he says,
"is sleeping."
-- Rob Garver
Rob Garver is a frequent contributor to PAW.
Books Received
Among School Teachers: Community Autonomy and Ideology in Teachers'
Work, by Joel Westheimer '85 (Teachers College Press, $38)
-- The author's study of two middle-school teacher communities revealed
substantial differences in ideology that affected personal and professional
relationships, curriculum management, and school discipline. Westheimer
is an assistant professor of education at NYU.
The Case for Pragmatic Psychology, by Daniel B. Fishman '60
(New York University, $19.95) -- Using recent developments in
postmodernism and pragmatism, the author argues that actual cases should
be the starting and ending points of psychological research. Fishman is
a professor of clinical and organizational psychology at Rutgers.
The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature, edited
by David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal *95 (University of Massachusetts,
$17.95) -- Essay topics range from the 18th-century cultural role of
the tavern to the contemporary emergence of the "disease paradigm"
of alcoholism. Rosenthal teaches English at Kent State University.
Promise and Dilemma: Perspectives on Racial Diversity and Higher Education,
edited by Eugene Y. Lowe '71 (Princeton, $29.95) -- Includes
nine essays that grew out of the Princeton Conference on Higher Education
in 1996. Lowe is an associate provost at Northwestern and a former dean
of students at Princeton.
Caring for Victims of Torture, edited by James M. Jaranson
and Michael K. Popkin '65 (American Psychiatric Press, $23.95)
-- This clinical guide discusses the most recent advances in knowledge
about government-sanctioned torture and offers practical approaches to diagnosis
and treatment. Popkin is chief of psychiatry at the Hennepin County Medical
Center, in Minneapolis.
The McKinsey Way, by Ethan M. Rasiel '86 (McGraw-Hill,
$21.95) -- A guide to the techniques of the management consulting firm.
Rasiel worked for McKinsey from 1989 to 1992.
What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered, by Fiona Cowie *94 (Oxford,
$35) -- A critique of the assertion that some concepts, beliefs, or
capacities are innate. Cowie is an associate professor at the California
Institute of Technology.
The Ph.D. Process: A Student's Guide to Graduate Schools in the Sciences,
by Nicholas Cohen '59 et al. (Oxford, $16.95) -- Examines
issues ranging from lab etiquette to research stress in the biological and
physical sciences. Cohen is a professor of microbiology and immunology at
the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Assessment in Counseling, by Albert B. Hood and Richard W.
Johnson '56 (American Counseling Association, $29.95) -- The second
edition of this guide to psychological assessment procedures. Johnson is
a director of training and an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison.
The David Levine Affair: Separatist Betrayal or McCarthyism North?
by Randal Marlin '59 (Fernwood, $16.95) -- An analysis of
Canadian separatist politics and the influence of the media in shaping public
opinion. Marlin teaches philosophy at Carleton College.
Revision Total Hip Arthroplasty, by Marvin E. Steinberg '54
and Jonathan P. Garino (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, $159)
-- A manual for orthopedic surgeons. Steinberg is a professor of orthopedic
surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
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