Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an investigative reporter to writing a book-length exploration of Jan Hendrik Schön’s frauds at Bell Labs, providing a detailed picture of the conditions that made it possible for him to get away with his fraud as long as he did.
Eugenie Samuel Reich agreed to answer some questions about Plastic Fantastic and the Schön case. My questions, and her answers, after the jump.
Category Archives: Misconduct
Book review: Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World.
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
by Eugenie Samuel Reich
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
2009
The scientific enterprise is built on trust and accountability. Scientists are accountable both to the world they are trying to describe and to their fellow scientists, with whom they are working to build a reliable body of knowledge. And, given the magnitude of the task, they must be able to trust the other scientists engaged in this knowledge-building activity.
When scientists commit fraud, they are breaking trust with their fellow scientists and failing to be accountable to their phenomena or their scientific community. Once a fraud has been revealed, it is easy enough to flag it as pathological science and its perpetrator as a pathological scientist. The larger question, though, is how fraud is detected by the scientific community — and what conditions allow fraud to go unnoticed.
In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, Eugenie Samuel Reich explores the scientific career of fraudster Jan Hendrik Schön, piecing together the mechanics of how he fooled the scientific community and considering the motivations that may have driven him. Beyond this portrait of a single pathological scientist, though, the book considers the responses of Schön’s mentors, colleagues, and supervisors, of journal editors and referees, of the communities of physicists and engineers. What emerges is a picture that challenges the widely held idea that science can be counted on to be self-correcting.
Tempering justice with mercy: the question of youthful offenders in the tribe of science.
Recently, I wrote a post about two researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who were caught falsifying data in animal studies of immune suppressing drugs. In the post, I conveyed that this falsification was very bad indeed, and examined some of the harm it caused. I also noted that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meted out somewhat different penalties to the principal investigator (ten year voluntary exclusion from government funding and from serving in any advisory capacity with the PHS) and to her postdoc (three year voluntary exclusion from government funding and PHS advisory roles). Moreover, UAB had left open the possibility that the postdoc might work on other people’s research projects under very strict mentoring. (Owing to the ORI ruling, these research projects would have to be ones funded by someone other than the U.S. government, however.)
On that post, commenter Paul Browne disagreed with my suggestion that rehabilitation of the postdoc in this case might be an end worth seeking:
“While such an obvious departure from an experimental protocol — especially an in an experiment involving animal use — isn’t much of an ethical gray area, I think there’s something to be said for treating early-career scientists as potentially redeemable in the aftermath of such ethical screw-ups.”
You have got to be kidding.
We’re not talking about an honest mistake, or deviating from an approved protocol with the best of intentions, or excluding a few outliers from the analysis but rather a decade of repeatedly lying to their funders, their IACUC and to other scientists working in their field.
What they did almost makes me wish that science has a ceremony similar to the old military drumming out.
At the very least they should both be charged with fraud, and since they presumably included their previous falsified results in support of NIH grant applications it shouldn’t be too hard to get a conviction.
Believe me, I understand where Paul is coming from. Given the harm that cheaters can do to the body of shared knowledge on which the scientific community relies, and to the trust within the scientific community that makes coordination of effort possible, I understand the impulse to remove cheaters from the community once and for all.
But this impulse raises a big question: Can a scientist who has made an ethical misstep be rehabilitated and reintegrated as a productive member of the scientific community? Or is your first ethical blunder grounds for permanent expulsion from the community? In practice, this isn’t just a question about the person who commits the ethical violation. It’s also a question about what other scientists in the community can stomach in dealing with the offenders — especially when the offender turns out to be a close colleague or a trainee.
University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers caught falsifying data in animal studies.
There are days when I imagine that I’ll run out of news reports of scientists caught behaving badly to blog about. Then, I check my inbox.
Today, my inbox featured a news item in The Scientist about two medical researchers caught fabricating data:
Newspaper’s editor exposes intern’s plagiarism.
The Colorado Springs Gazette discovered that a summer intern in their newsroom published articles with plagiarized passages. The editor of the paper, Jeff Thomas, deemed this plagiarism a breach of the paper’s trust with the public:
[R]eporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the [New York] Times, as is required when quoting the work of some other publication.
Here are selected excerpts from the four Gazette stories, paired with links to the Times news stories from which material was inappropriately borrowed. …
How to discourage scientific fraud.
In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher’s piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don’t keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher.
But there’s another piece of his article that I’d like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud.
Gallagher writes:
Fraud, rehabilitation, and the persistence of information on the internet.
In the current issue of The Scientist, there’s a pair of interesting pieces about how professional life goes on (or doesn’t) for scientists found guilty of misconduct by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Alison McCook’s article, Life After Fraud, includes interviews with three scientists against whom the ORI has made formal rulings of misconduct. A big concern voiced by each of these scientists is that after the period of their debarment from eligibility to receive federal grants or to serve on a Public Health Service (PHS) committee has expired, the traces of their punishment persist online. McCook writes:
Familiar themes in a new instance of scientific misconduct: the Kuklo case.
The New York Times has an article about a physician-scientist caught in scientific misconduct. The particular physician-scientist, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, was an Army surgeon working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is now (for the time being anyway) a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since the wrongdoing of which Kuklo was accused happened while he was at Walter Reed, the Army investigated.
That investigation “substantiated all the accusations against the physician.”
The Kuklo case has lots of ethical issues we’ve seen before. The New York Times article goes through them for the Nth time. That we’ve seen these same issues in misconduct and “misbehavior” cases on many, many, occasions might make one wonder how scientists, journal editors, and corporate sponsors of research failed to internalize any of the lessons they might have learned from the (N-1) times that came before this one.
After all, they’re supposed to be good at spotting trends in the data.
Among the familiar themes in this case, I notice:
The mechanics of getting fooled: the multiple failures in the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schön.
There’s an interesting article in the Telegraph by Eugenie Samuel Reich looking back at the curious case of Jan Hendrik Schön. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, the Bell Labs physicist was producing a string of impressive discoveries — most of which, it turns out, were fabrications. Reich (who has published a book about Schön, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World) considers how Schön’s frauds fooled his fellow physicists. Her recounting of the Schön saga suggests clues that should have triggered more careful scrutiny, if not alarm bells.
Of Schön’s early work at Bell Labs, Reich writes:
Cleaning up scientific competition: an interview with Sean Cutler (part 2).
Yesterday, I posted the first part of my interview with Sean Cutler, a biology professor on a mission to get the tribe of science to understand that good scientific competition is not antithetical to cooperation. Cutler argues that the problem scientists (and journal editors, and granting agencies) need to tackle is scientists who try to get an edge in the competition by unethical means. As Cutler put it (in a post at TierneyLab):
Scientists who violate these standards [e.g., not making use of information gained when reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication] are unethical – this is the proverbial no-brainer. But as my colleague and ethicist Coleen Macnamara says, “There is more to ethics than just following the rules- it’s also about helping people when assistance comes at little cost to oneself.” The “little experiment” I did was an exercise in this form of ethical competition. Yes, I could have rushed to the finish line as secretly and quickly as possible and scoop everyone, but I like to play out scenarios and live my life as an experimentalist. By bringing others on board, I turned my competitors turn into collaborators. The paper is better as a result and no one got scooped. A good ethical choice led to a more competitive product.
But how easy is it to change entrenched patterns of behavior? When scientists have been trained to take advantage of every competitive advantage to stay in the scientific game, what might it take to make ethical behavior seem like an advantage rather than an impediment to success?
My interview with Sean Cutler continues: