Much of the scientific community is rejoicing over the decision in the academic misconduct case of Thereza Imanishi-Kari, now of Tufts University, who was accused of fabricating immunological data in a paper published in 1986 by CELL. Her recent vindication by a Department of Health and Human Services board of appeals removes a cloud of suspicion that had hung unfairly for ten years over her and one of her co-authors, David Baltimore.
In the aftermath, questions have been properly raised about the procedures in place at the Office of Scientific (now Research)Integrity-procedures so viscous and so unfair that a decade of damaging leaks and rumors intervened before the charges were finally overturned. The intimidating role of Congressman John Dingell and his Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which frightened the National Institutes of Health and even the Secret Service into participation, has been put on public view. There are considered calls for reform in both areas.
So there is something to cheer about, but it would be foolish to paint this as a happy ending, from which we and the victims can move forward to lead better lives. There is a deeper and more uncomfortable aspect of this sad story that has received almost no attention. Why did so few people recognize the affair for what it was early in the game? Why did so few scientists or journalists detect its unfairness, and press for a remedy? In short, where the hell was everybody?
In our society we depend on two sources for sobering second thoughts about controversies of this kind. One is the affected community itself, in this case, the scientific establishment in the United States, which has a tradition of devotion to academic and other kinds of freedom. One might therefore have expected it to be robust in its expression of concern about the fairness of charges leveled against one of its members. However, too many of us were content to presume that Imanishi-Kari was guilty.
The other line of defense, surely, would be a free and aggressive press. In other cases of injustice, the nation's leading newspapers have often been in the vanguard of rectification. Indeed, they have frequently seemed to enjoy revealing the transgressions and then urging, on the editorial page, that they be made right.
To examine the history of the Imanishi-Kari/Baltimore case is to suffer a loss of faith in both. Among the nation's most attended-to newspapers, The Los Angeles Times gave the affair minimal treatment, save for a 1994 story heavily critical of Baltimore and headlined "Science Must Police Its Ranks: Why Are Whistle-Blowers Often Penalized and Misdeeds Overlooked?" At the Washington Post, Malcolm Gladwell and some of his colleagues handled it with greater objectivity in the paper's news and editorial pages in the same year, criticizing both the process and the protagonists. The New York Times gave it much closer attention throughout, often on the front page. The tone of that coverage, until this year, was relentlessly negative. The reporter whose byline was on nearly every story was Philip Hilts. In 1992, in an article in the New Republic, Hilts wrote of David Baltimore that he "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." Even though he had obviously made up his mind about the case, and in public at that, the Times editors kept him on the beat for three more years - while he covered the Justice Department's decision not to prosecute Imanishi-Kari and the decision of the ORI, subsequently reversed, that found her guilty on 23 counts of scientific fraud.
When earlier concern over the charges put Baltimore's short-lived presidency of Rockefeller University in jeopardy, the Times regularly reported negative and unattributed views about him from his faculty colleagues. In an editorial, it argued that Baltimore had received "rough justice."
During this time few in the press had much to say about the lack of due process at the Office of Research Integrity: Imanishi-Kari had no opportunity to cross-examine witnesses or even to hear specifics about the charges against her or to examine evidence (see Nature Medicine 2, 10; 1996).
As for the scientists, the record is even more disappointing. In the tortuous course of the ORI report, they were involved at several steps. First, there was a committee of three research peers; that group was then augmented, and a "final" report of five scientists was produced. It was divided as to Imanishi-Kari's guilt, but only the majority report was leaked to the press. ORI staff scientists then took the report and added their own interpretations. The shabbiness of their collective effort is laid bare in the Departmental Appeal Board's decision.
This is not the first time a committee of scientific peers has failed spectacularly in such a duty. In the earlier case of Mikulas Popovic, a colleague of Robert Gallo's who figured out how to make the AIDS virus grow in vitro, another report of an ORI committee was tested on appeal. The Appeal Board said of that one: "One might anticipate that from all this evidence, after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing. That is not the case." In the Popovic matter, there was not one committee of scientists but two; the ORI group's report was reviewed by an advisory committee to the Director of NIH whose members were nominated by the National Academy of Sciences. Following the scathing reversal by the Appeal Board, the ORI dropped its case against Gallo.
Not only have fellow scientists proved to be unreliable judges in such cases, they behaved badly in other ways during the period in which David Baltimore was hostage to the process. A group of distinguished biochemists, including Nobel laureates Walter Gilbert and James Watson, criticized him relentlessly in public. Members of the National Academy of Sciences refused invitations to support Baltimore by attendance at the Dingell hearings, and some even sought to challenge his Academy membership. And when his presidency at Rockefeller University hung in the balance, members of that faculty leaked adverse views to the press and lobbied the trustees to force his resignation.
At least two important lessons emerge from these sad events. First, we need the press, all right-but we need it to be even-handed and more willing to investigate both sides of charges like the ones in this case. Why weren't the hard questions asked about the lack of fairness in the ORI process, or the central role of Walter Stewart and Ned Feder, the self-appointed "fraud-busters" at NIH, or the unconscionable decade the whole thing took? One answer is that journalists were being fed leaks: press accounts frequently refer to unnamed subcommittee members and quote from documents obtained before they were made public. When such material comes regularly from one side of a controversy, it amounts to news management - and no responsible reporter should be captured in that way.
Second, there is no substitute for the adversarial system and the due process protections it has evolved. Scientists, perhaps because of their justified confidence in the system of peer review, have an instinctive faith in the judgments of their fellow scientists. In these cases, however, it is the lawyers, and their care for due process, who rescued the scientists. Anyone who becomes a victim of such a charge should gracefully decline to have peers make the judgment and should make tracks for the courthouse and its protections as quickly as possible.
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Donald Kennedy is president emeritus, Stanford University. Reprinted with permission from the August 1996 issue of Nature Medicine.
In response to a query from ScienceWriters, Phil Hilts said that The New York Times covered the Imanishi-Kari/Baltimore story more extensively than any other newspaper and that he considers the resulting stories to have been both accuract and fair. Noting that Dr. Kennedy had not brought any specific points into dispute, he said the test is in the stories and -- in his opinion -- they contained a wide variety of views.
Phil Hilts now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, writing a book and working half-time for The New York Times out of its New England bureau. His most recent book is Smokescreen: The truth Behind the Tobacco Inudstry Cover-Up, published by Addison-Wesley.
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