What Do We Mean When We Use The Term `Science Fraud'?

In late 1989, the Public Health Service (PHS)--the parent organization of the National Institutes of Health--ruled that after January 1990 no research proposal would be accepted from any university that did not certify that it had in place a formal set of regulations on how to handle research misconduct. Subsequently, an Office of Scientific Integrity was established at NIH to investigate alleged fraud. Meanwhile, although the National Science Foundation doesn't yet have such an office, it does have an inspector general who seems to serve much the same function. These entities are actually concerned not only with "fraud," but also with misconduct and conflict of interest--all three of which are types of misbehavior that may not always be so easily distinguishable. One of the reasons that nobody knows the exact extent of scientific fraud is that nobody knows exactly what it is. What do we mean by the phrase? The Office of Scientific Integrity defines scientific "mis- conduct" as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted with-in the scientific com- munity for proposing, conducting, and reporting research." By contrast, California Institute of Technology regulations (as a random example) define science fraud as "serious misconduct with intent to deceive, for example, faking data, plagiarism, or misappropriation of ideas." There are two distinctions to note here. First, PHS steers clear of saying "fraud," presumably because it doesn't want cases hung up on proving intent to deceive, an essential ingredient of fraud, whereas the Caltech rules assume that in offenses such as faking data, plagiarism, and misappropriations of ideas, intent to deceive is manifest. Second, whereas the Caltech regulations explicitly exclude from their domain transgressions less serious than those that the regulations define as fraud, the PHS rules cast a broad net with the phrase "practices...commonly accepted within the scientific community." Five Legal Points Even under the Caltech rules, however, research fraud is different from civil fraud. In tort law, there must be a plaintiff and a defendant; someone has to bring the case to court. To prevail, the plaintiff must prove five points: that a false representation was made; that the defendant knew it was false (or recklessly disregarded whether it was); that there was intent to induce belief in this misrepresentation; that there was reasonable belief on the part of the plaintiff; and that there was resulting damage. In science, no one is much interested in the fourth and fifth points. Nobody pretends that we have to prove these to prove research fraud. The Caltech regulations, which spell out "serious misconduct with intent to deceive" and so on, seem to encompass the first three: false representation, knowledge that the representation is false, and intent to induce belief. The five legal points necessary to prove fraud are based on long experience with the way people really behave, whereas the idea of what constitutes science fraud is based on what I call the Myth of the Noble Scientist. The Noble Scientist is somehow supposed to be more virtuous than ordinary people and, therefore, can be expected not to misbehave even in the smallest way. This myth only makes us more prone to misunderstanding what scientists do and what actually constitutes fraud. The effects of this can be seen in an analysis of science fraud accounts presented in the 1982 book Betrayers of the Truth (New York, Simon & Schuster Inc.) by science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade. The book has an appendix entitled "Known or Suspected Cases of Scientific Fraud," which indicts Galileo, Newton, Dalton, Mendel, and quite a number of others. I am familiar with some of the these--the case of Isaac Newton, for example, who some 300 years ago explained the propagation of sound waves in air. Newton's theory was so good he was able to calculate the speed of sound and then compare it with measurements. When he did, they disagreed by about 20 percent. This discrepancy bothered Newton, so he set out to explain it. The real explanation has turned out to be that sound is adiabatic and isentropic, and Newton had assumed implicitly that it was isothermal. In other words, in a sound wave there's heating and cooling that pushes the sound along a little faster than it would otherwise go. Newton didn't take account of that effect, so he calculated the speed that sound would have if it were all at one temperature. That subtle difference would not be understood for another 200 years, so you certainly can't blame Newton for not knowing it. But because he was disturbed that his theory didn't quite correspond to the observation, he tried to cook up some explanation for the discrepancy. He came up with all kinds of things that sound hilarious to us now: the water vapor in the air didn't participate, he had ignored the space taken up by the molecules of air, and other things like that. He made little fixes until he finally got the theory in agreement with the experiment. It's the sort of thing that every theorist does today; if you have a theory that doesn't quite agree with the experiment, you speculate on what might cause the small discrepancy. That's exactly what Newton was doing. In hindsight Newton's fixes are funny--and that's the way people really act. But it's not fraud. Another example cited by Broad and Wade in their book is that of Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech's founder and first Nobel Prize winner. The accusation of fraud is based on Millikan's laboratory notebooks, which we have in our archives at Caltech and which I have read and shown to my students. Millikan was measuring the electric charges of oil drops; he wanted to prove that the electron charge came in definite units, and then he wanted to measure what that unit was. Eventually, he published a paper that, he claimed, included data on all the drops he experimented upon during 60 consecutive days. But when you look through his notebooks, it appears a bit different. Each page has notations on one drop. Millikan would spend a whole evening watching a single drop go up and down in his electric field, measuring its speed, taking down data, making calculations, getting the result for the charge. He knew, of course, what result he expected. So in some cases he would write in red (everything is black), "Beauty--Publish," or "One of the best I've ever had--Publish." And then on one page he wrote, "Very low--something wrong." And you know that one did not get published, in spite of the fact that he said he published everything. But he doesn't just throw something out because he doesn't like it. He examines his experiment to figure out what mistake he's made, and when he finds the mistake, it is duly noted on the page. People make mistakes; experiments are always pushing the limits of the possible. Scientists are always at the state of the art, and we make mistakes in the laboratory all the time. If everybody were obliged to publish every mistake, the scientific literature would be so full of garbage that you wouldn't be able to read it. What Millikan was doing was perfectly legitimate: He would examine the "wrong" result and would find that he had made a mistake and conclude that the result had to be tossed out. Of course, he did not try quite so hard to find some reason for throwing away the results that were "right." That's really the point at which the bias enters his result. This kind of bias is built into all scientific research. Even though we take elaborate precautions--such as double-blind tests--to try to avoid this kind of unconscious bias, it still creeps into scientific results. But to call it fraud is irresponsible. Millikan is merely another casualty of the Myth of the Noble Scientist, which ignores the dynamics of the way real scientists work. Millikan and Newton weren't guilty of fraud, but clearly some others are. Who are they? Patricia Woolf, a Princeton University sociologist, did a study of 26 cases of serious scientific misconduct that surfaced in one way or another between 1980 and 1987. It turned out that, of the 26 cases, two were in chemistry and biochemistry, one was in physiology, two were in psychology, and 21 were in biomedical sciences. Furthermore, of the 26, some 17 were committed by M.D.'s rather than Ph.D.'s. So the conclusion is inescapable that scientific fraud is essentially biomedical fraud, at least in recent times. The $64,000 question is: Why is that true? One reason some have suggested is that there is more money in biomedical sciences, and money corrupts. Fraud in the form of plagiarism, however, is not unusual in fields such as history, where there is little money to be found. So it seems to me that money is not the principal motivating force. I believe that career pressure is more important. In every case of science fraud I've looked at, somebody was advancing a career rather than seeking money. I used to have a theory that had to do with the reproduction of results. In physics, and in other fields in which there is little fraud, people believe that experiments are precisely reproducible, in the sense that if somebody goes into the lab and does the same experiment, he or she will get the same results. Now, every researcher knows this is not true. Real experiments are too hard for that to be the case, but the whole field is pervaded by the idea that things are causally related in a relatively straightforward way, and therefore reproducible. So it would be foolish for me to fake a data point, because somebody will repeat the experiment and find the data point in a different place. Shortcuts This is what I thought before I started looking seriously at some notable cases of fraud. What I found instead was that in every single case, the person who perpetrated the fraud thought he knew the answer. That's quite different from feeling that you're in an imprecise field in which things are not very reproducible. These scientists really thought that they knew what the answer was, and that by faking the data all they were doing was helping things along a bit. They weren't perpetrating a false result; they were just taking a shortcut--leaving out some steps that weren't really necessary because they knew what the answer was. You can see that in the case of Cyril Burt, the psychologist who faked data on identical twins. He knew that intelligence was inherited, and to go out and find 33 more sets of identical twins who had been separated at birth would be impossibly difficult. And it was really unnecessary because he knew what the answer would be if he went through all that work. You can see it even in the case of Piltdown man. By 1912, prehistoric human remains had been discovered in France and Germany, and there was some indication that there might even be some in Africa. If they had been discovered in those other places, there had to be prehistoric human remains in England. It was only a matter of helping things along. There are many mysteries about the whole business, and perhaps all of these factors play a role. It seems clear that scientists are most vulnerable to cheating or cutting corners when: they are under career pressure to produce something; they think they know what the answer is and feel that actually going to the trouble to take the data just slows down the inevitable process; and they think they are somewhat protected by the fact that experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible. There is no human activity that can stand up to the glare of relentless, absolute honesty. We all build little hypocrisies into what we do to make life easier to live. Because science is a very human activity, there are hypocrisies and misrepresentations built into the way we do it. For example, every scientific paper is written as if that particular investigation were a triumphant procession from one truth to another. All of us who actually work in the trenches, however, know that every scientific experiment is chaotic. You never know what's going on; you can't understand what the data mean. But in the end you figure out what it was all about and then, with hindsight, you write it up, describing it as one clear and certain step after another. This is a kind of hypocrisy, but it's deeply embedded in the way we do science. The Myth of the Noble Scientist serves us poorly because it obscures the distinction between harmless minor hypocrisies and real fraud. The PHS interpretation is dangerous because it assumes there is a single set of practices commonly accepted by the scientific community, and sets up a government agency to root out deviations from those practices. Nevertheless, fraud does sometimes occur in science, and the academic community was poorly equipped to deal with it before PHS and the National Science Foundation forced it to put its house in order and write down and adopt regulations. It's easy to predict that we will be seeing more cases of scientific misconduct for a while; the very existence of regulations and bodies designed to cope with the problem tends to make cases emerge. I can only hope we won't wind up arranging things in such a way as would have inhibited Newton or Millikan from doing their thing. David Goodstein is vice provost at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. This article is excerpted from Windows (Fall 1991, page 7), published by the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, Texas A&M University. Used by permission.

What Do We Mean When We Use The Term `Science Fraud'?

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