Cleaning Up the Lab

SCIENTISTS and politicians have never been friendly bedfellows. "Leave us alone, you ignorant former humanities majors!" yell the white-coated researchers who contend that congressional investigations into scientific endeavors encroach upon academic freedom.

"Just where is all this money going?" respond government officials, who believe that scientists--their impressive degrees notwithstanding--may be guilty of misusing government research grants.

Perhaps the most celebrated case of scientific conduct (or misconduct, depending on whom you talk to) is the accusations that a 1986 article in Cell magazine contained fudged data. Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel prizewinning director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, was one of six authors of the research paper on genetic transplants. Although Baltimore was never formally accused of any wrongdoing, a congressional investigation found the scientific equivalent of a smoking gun in the laboratory of one of his co-authors. Their research project was being funded in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Over the last three years, while the investigation has been opened, closed and then re-opened again, Baltimore has become the leading public spokesperson for scientific independence from congressional scrutiny. He wholeheartedly defends the laboratories associated with the doctored data. Science rests on trust and accuracy, Baltimore says, and nosey members of Congress can only screw things up.

Baltimore's position has been supported by some of the most influential talking heads in the scientific community. Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology at Harvard, wrote this summer, "Fraud is a pathology...Error, on the other hand, falls into the category of unavoidable side consequences to commendable activity."

To call the science community protective is an understatement. It is a tightly-knit enclave that relies heavily on trust: trust that a peer-reviewer will not swipe your idea, trust that a lab is keeping accurate information, trust that the end goal of science is knowledge, not an NIH grant or university tenure.

Granted, this trust is important. But the scientific community would be doing itself a favor if it accepted that fraud occurs and dealt with the problem fairly. Instead, the belief in the primacy of trust blinds scientists to its shortcomings.

Baltimore, still in the midst of the House investigation, was recently offered the presidency of Rockefeller University, a national center for research and teaching that relies extensively on contributions and grants.

Baltimore's appointment has divided the Rockefeller trustees and faculty. Many believe that Baltimore's protective and somewhat arrogant attitude during the investigation raises serious doubts about his qualifications. Even if Baltimore is innocent of wrongdoing, as he probably is, his disinclination toward rooting out fraud among his colleagues is a poor example for the head of a research institution.

Baltimore dealt with the inquiry in a confrontational and almost flippant manner. Except for a scanty correction in Cell, Baltimore never even attempted to rebut the allegations that the Cell project was a product of wholesale deception.

And if the current investigation finds Baltimore guilty of some improper conduct, Rockefeller's reputation will be seriously tarnished.

Baltimore's critics realize that congressional investigations are not undertaken lightly. Something was seriously amiss, and Congress intends to do something to prevent similar incidents in the future. Unfortunately, Congress's handling of the recent controversy surrounding funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities doesn't inspire much confidence in its ability to intervene intelligently in such matters.

THE scientific community still has a chance to clean up its act before Congress gets its clumsy hands into the laboratory. Perennial admonitions to the scientific community have not gone completely unheeded. Many universities and mega-laboratories have instituted guidelines to control the more destructive consequences of scientific competition.

For its part, NIH will now accept only bibliographies of fewer than two pages, a policy intended to discourage printfrenzied scientists from slapping their names on every article that passes through their labs.

In a hard-hitting report that accused the scientific community of allowing the pressure to publish to make them too "tolerable of substandard practices," the Institute of Medicine offered some other suggestions for reducing the incentive for fraud. Among them: decreasing the emphasis on publications in promotion considerations and limiting the number of junior faculty members under any one professor.

Not surprisingly, these recommendations all originated within the scientific community itself, the only group that can adequately deal with the problem of research fraud. Congress is not qualified to judge the accuracy of primary data, nor is it qualified to determine whether a flaw is a deliberate deception or an honest mistake.

Scientists should recognize that fraud does occur, and that the pressure to publish or perish is the primary cause. It would be in everyone's best interests for scientists to address the problem candidly, rather than ignore it or defensively deny that it exists. Scientists should waste no time in enacting new safeguards of their own, before Congress imposes the clumsy remedy of its choosing. After all, Congress has better things to do than to pick on Nobel laureates.