Editor's Note: Scientists Walter Stewart, 48, and Ned Feder, 65, have been working side by side at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in Bethesda, Md., since the late 1960s. Their employment agreements with NIDDK once required that they spend 80 percent of their time on health- related lab research and 20 percent on their investigations of scientific fraud and misconduct. However, their renown in the international science community stems virtually 100 percent from their work in the latter category.
Most prominent among their forays into what's become known as fraud-busting are cases that arose in the early and mid-1980s involving scientists John Darsee, a Harvard University cardiologist, and David Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist. In the first instance, Stewart and Feder found--and subsequently documented in a published article (Nature, 325:207, Jan. 15, 1987)--that some of Darsee's coauthors on a paper had, to use Stewart ...
