The venerable Nature, which published the paper in its January 15 issue, has once again served science well. The publication process was certainly protracted; various versions of the paper have been under consideration there and elsewhere off and on since 1983. But drawn-out negotiations and repeated reviews resulted finally in an article presumably purged of potential grounds for libel suits. It was accompanied by a thoughtful two-page editorial and a commentary by Eugene Braunwald, one of Darsee's Harvard co-authors, whose attorney had been among the most importunate in the array of legal talent that came close to preventing publication altogether.
Darsee, you'll remember, was the Harvard postdoc who was caught making up data in 1981. Vast amounts of it, as it turned out, in scores of papers he published while at Harvard and at Emory University in Atlanta. Until its publication, the Stewart-Feder paper may well have been the best-known ...
