Nota: anche David Baltimore, come Gallo, faceva parte dell'operazione MK-NAOMI? Che ruolo ha Dulbecco nella mistificazione alimentata per nascondere gli effetti della contaminazione radioattiva? Perché ogni volta che spunta uno scandalo planetario fanno capolino le organizzazioni vicine ai Rockefeller? Come può il cittadino difendersi dai miti sanitari creati allo scopo di "tenerlo buono"?

1938-, American microbiologist, b. New York City. In 1970 he and his wife, Alice Huang, discovered reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that allows RNA to synthesize DNA in RETROVIRUSES. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin. Appointed president of Rockefeller Univ. in 1990, he resigned the next year after a scientific fraud scandal. A paper he coauthored contained fraudulent data from another author; Baltimore was criticized for his vehement defense of the paper despite the evidence and for possibly attempting a coverup.

The Scientist 6[3]:1, Feb. 03, 1992

Related Links
Books Special: Science on Trial: The Baltimore Case
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Reviews 'The Baltimore Case' (September 14, 1998)

By ROY PORTER

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin could work out his theory of evolution by natural selection more or less in the privacy of his own country house. ''Big science'' has long since ceased to bear any resemblance to a leisurely gentleman's pursuit, however; it is ferociously competitive, it has an insatiable thirst for public funds, and it is now everyone's concern. How poorly we know how to handle this Frankenstein's monster comes across in ''The Baltimore Case,'' a splendid study of a major contemporary scientific scandal by the eminent historian Daniel J. Kevles.

Back in 1975, David Baltimore, a high-powered biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of retroviruses and the elucidation of their way of reproducing themselves. Building on this, he went on to develop a research program designed to explore the potential of recombinant DNA. One consequence was that in 1986 he was an author of a paper that said that inserting a special mouse gene into a certain strain of mice caused changes in the host mouse's antibodies -- a finding that promised to be significant for genetic modification of the immune system.

A postdoctoral researcher in the lab, Margot O'Toole, found she was unable to reproduce some of the reported results in her own experimental mice. Her attempts to resolve the problem with her immediate boss, the Brazilian-born Dr. Thereza Imanishi-Kari, led O'Toole to suspect defects or errors in the original research; her doubts seemed to be confirmed when inspection of laboratory notebooks revealed discrepancies with the published results. Apparently fobbed off by Imanishi-Kari, with whom there was obviously a major personality clash, O'Toole felt affronted that her superiors appeared to show so little commitment to the fearless pursuit of scientific truth to which they paid lip service. She made her suspicions public and turned whistle-blower.

One thing led to another, and in time, courtesy of another disgruntled laboratory member, O'Toole found herself put in touch with two researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Ned Feder and Walter Stewart, a pair of zealots who had risen to public prominence in the mid-1980's as fraudbusters. Obsessed with cleansing science's Augean stables, these self-appointed and increasingly messianic vigilantes took up her cause with alacrity, and the tenor of her complaints began to shift from claims of shoddiness to accusations of dishonesty and cover-up. Under scrutiny, Imanishi-Kari's attempts to vindicate her data -- here a restatement, there a minor retraction -- failed to carry conviction; she herself was later to admit: ''I am not a neat person.''

Against a background of public anxiety about fraud in science, focused by the New York Times science writers William J. Broad and Nicholas Wade's expose, ''Betrayers of the Truth'' (1983), and rising fears about the possible misuse of recombinant DNA, the case came before an N.I.H. scientific panel. The press began to portray the idealistic and impassioned O'Toole as a martyr sacrificed by her scientific seniors: it was said, wrongly, as Kevles notes, that she had lost her job and her home, and had been cold-shouldered by the establishment. The cover letter to a leaked draft report from the N.I.H. committee said Imanishi-Kari was guilty of ''serious scientific misconduct'' for ''repeatedly presenting false and misleading information'' and accused Baltimore of a cover-up. The fact that he had stuck by his co-workers was read as proof of his arrogance and irritation at having his own authority impugned.

The crucial juncture came in 1989 when Representative John D. Dingell pressed a series of Congressional hearings. A man dedicated to rooting out the misuse of Federal funding, not least by unaccountable scientists, he was handed a gift on a plate when Baltimore lost his cool under questioning, petulantly alleging that the investigation represented a threat to scientific freedom and implying that none but scientists had the right to monitor themselves, because they alone could understand how science works. Dingell then launched a humiliation exercise. He brought Secret Service forensics (analysis of ink and paper, overwrite detectors and so forth) to bear on Imanishi-Kari's lab notebooks in hopes of uncovering after-the-event tampering. The affair took on the air of a scientific Watergate, and science itself seemed to be on trial.

This could not have come at a worse moment for Baltimore: he had just taken up a highly prestigious appointment as president of Rockefeller University. His new colleagues now began to get twitchy, and the flames of discontent were fanned by what seems to have been a spiteful cabal from Harvard. Baltimore's unguarded and undiplomatic intervention, it was alleged, would turn Congress and the public against science, reducing the flow of indispensable research dollars and tarnishing science's reputation. A whispering campaign, probably involving jealousies, forced Baltimore's resignation after just 18 months, amid much editorializing about the hubris of scientific satraps who had got too big for their boots and needed to be taken down a peg or two.

If the rise and fall of Baltimore seemed to unfold with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, there was, after a fashion, a happy ending. Eventually the pendulum of opinion started to swing. Dingell began to be represented as a latter-day Joseph McCarthy, with O'Toole as his stooge. Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore assumed O'Toole's role of victim, seen as the targets of a new ''Galileo trial'' or a witch hunt being carried out by the ''science police.'' When Imanishi-Kari appealed against the findings, a further scientific review board was convened, and when that eventually reported in 1996, she was officially exonerated of fabrication -- and rightly so, Kevles believes. She got tenure, and in 1997 Baltimore, no longer typed as a conceited bigmouth but praised for his loyalty, was appointed president of the California Institute of Technology. (Conspiracy-spotters will note that Kevles has taught there for more than 30 years.)

Having watched this case unfold from the other side of the Atlantic, and writing as I do from an English perspective, I am gravely tempted to feel very superior, and to suppose that, somehow, we do things better over here. Only in America are people so judgmental and moralistic, so quick to cry fraud and to spy conspiracy. Isn't this another example of what Richard Hofstadter once memorably called the paranoid style in American politics, extended to science? Where else would this storm in a teacup -- after all, it wasn't such an important paper in the first place -- get blown up into a megascandal, involving the expenditure of goodness knows how many man-hours and dollars and the venting of such acrimony? Indeed, as Kevles himself reflects, the American scientific establishment is tailor-made to create such situations, with big-shot scientists controlling huge fiefdoms and being positively expected to run their baronies in a macho manner.

But all that would be insufferably smug and quite wrong as well, for it is a problem for us all. By consequence of the abuse of power by politicians (Vietnam and after) and also by scientists (the bomb, perhaps AIDS research, and in Britain the mad cow disease crisis), these are times when the public no longer implicitly trusts the integrity and judgment of traditional authority figures -- perhaps no bad thing. Yet we still expect scientists to come up with the goods; and by loading them with superhuman expectations of productivity and success in an impossibly demanding, competitive milieu, we give tacit encouragement to anything from the mild finagling of figures through to outright fraud. Reflecting on the so-called crime wave in science, a bit-part actor in this sorry affair, Bernard Harris of Harvard Medical School, wryly remarked that the incidence of fraud in N.I.H. grantees was ''way below 1 percent. I'm not sure that the number of crooks in Congress is less than 1 percent.''

Kevles's book, meticulously researched and skillfully constructed, if at times weighed down with detail, poses the question: who was actually on trial? And who judges the judges? We all wish to avoid a science police, but can we really rely on the internal dynamics of science to root out frauds and fakes? In our culture of suspicion and complaint, that is a question that cannot be ducked.

Roy Porter teaches at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

As the eminent institution moves to recover from the David Baltimore scandal, some scientists continue in assessing its impact

Date: February 3, 1992

 A business-as-usual mood prevails these days at New York City's Rockefeller University. The prestigious research institution is moving to regain its balance following the dizzying chain of events leading to the December resignation of scandal-hounded scientist David Baltimore from its presidency.

 Meanwhile, university scientists and administrators around the United States continue to assess the impact of the six-year- long controversy leading to the Nobelist's fall from grace, not only on Rockefeller, but also on the research community at large.

 Sources interviewed for this article generally agree that the university, now  under new leadership, will recover from the negative publicity it received as the result of its association with Baltimore, an otherwise highly esteemed Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. The university had named Baltimore as its president in mid-1990; only a year and a half later, he resigned, his reputation sullied as a result of his coauthorship and vigorous defense of a 1986 Cell paper that was deemed fraudulent.

Many academics agree that since the research in question did not occur at Rockefeller, the institution will have no trouble regaining its full stature. The univer- sity's impeccable reputation in the scientific community, they say, will be diminished only slightly because the controversial Baltimore was named as president.

At the time that concerns about the Cell paper were first raised by a junior research associate in May 1986, Baltimore was director of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

As the Rockefeller-Baltimore connection becomes less of a gossip point for scientists and the news media, the institution's new president, 1981 Nobel-winning neurobiologist Torsten Wiesel, says he is able to channel his energies on research, the recruitment of junior and senior faculty, and fund raising--all efforts that had been invigorated during Baltimore's brief tenure. Baltimore, although controversial, did help bring in young blood to Rockefeller, say insiders.

While things are quieting down at Rockefeller, the aftershock of the Baltimore affair still can be felt at research institutions throughout the U.S., sources say. Most significantly, these sources say, Baltimore's inappropriately vigorous defense of the Cell paper, the apparent deficiencies in the lab procedures that produced it, and the role that a supervising scientist plays in relation to subordinates continue to be the objects of heated debate. Indeed, the paper, Baltimore's behavior, and other related matters have emerged in some quarters to constitute a case study in how all scientists should approach lab research and the subsequent publication of results.

Rockefeller's new president, who also is a faculty member at the school, says that Baltimore's conduct has already affected the way other scientists in the U.S. have dealt with allegations of research wrongdoing. For example, he cites how molecular biologist Leroy Hood, when affiliated with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, quickly and publicly acknowledged his responsibility last September for not catching in a published paper the fact that a coauthor misleadingly used the same photograph to illustrate two different experiments. "Hood immediately dealt with it openly, in a way he might not have done if [Baltimore's case] hadn't happened," says Wiesel. The coauthor was censured and fired.

Other academic administrators say the resignation of Baltimore is a needed catharsis for the scientific community and for the public, which has a right to trust in the integrity of the scientific enterprise it supports with its tax dollars. Stanley Korenman, a professor of medicine and associate dean at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, says: "Our society demands punishment." It wasn't right that "such a prestigious position should be held by a diminished person," he adds.

Korenman agrees with Wiesel that the negative effect of Baltimore's defensive posture has changed the way other scientists will handle possible cases of misconduct. "They are more open and are more willing to say `mea culpa,'<|>" he says.

Pragmatic as well as ideological concerns demand a deeper awareness of ethical issues such as those raised by the Baltimore paper's publication, many scientists agree. One observer, Barry Cooperman--vice provost for research at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia--points out the potential threat that professional misconduct poses to the public's funding, through the taxes it pays, of laboratory research. "The larger society is taking notice of this big enterprise of biomedical research," he says. Cooperman adds that the public has a right to expect that scientists be above reproach, especially in light of the fact that the impact of much research--particularly in health-related areas of study-- is by no means parochial, but of great consequence to millions of taxpayers.

Daniel Larkin, a Philadelphia attorney who handles scientific misconduct cases on behalf of accused scientists and investigating universities, says that the Baltimore case underscores the need for universities to improve the ways in which they address instances of alleged misconduct. Had documentation of testimony at the initial stages of the investigation occurred in the Cell paper case, some of the issues still in question might be long-since resolved, says Larkin.

"The procedures that currently exist in universities to investigate these things are haphazard," he says. Evidence collected would not stand up in court; and if fraud did occur, eventually the courts might have to intervene and take over from the university's investigation, the attorney says.

The problem with current university procedures, says Larkin, is that reviewing allegations of misconduct is undertaken by academic science officials with approximately the same degree of intensity as they use when reviewing an article for publication. But, he says, the implications of not accepting an article for publication are different from the determination, for example, of whether an experiment was done as described in a paper.

The consequence of fraudulent or otherwise flawed research in clinical medical investigations, Larkin points out, could have tragically detrimental effects on the public.

Paul Friedman, dean of academic affairs at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, feels, however, that the current methods to investigate misconduct cases at universities are adequate. "We don't want to have a police state," says Friedman. He does say, though, that the lesson of the Baltimore case is that it might remind scientists to be a bit more skeptical of the colleagues they otherwise might jump to defend during a misconduct investigation.

"Skepticism is what scientists are supposed to have in the face of observation of facts," he says.

"Although scientists are supposed to trust each other and what is in the literature, the [Baltimore] case raises the question of when do you become skeptical of your colleague; when should you suspend trust?"

E come Einstein
Il “Dizionario biografico degli scienziati e dei tecnici” copre una vistosa lacuna dell’editoria italiana. Un’opera che si rivolge a tutti, specialisti e non. Escluse le femministe
di Federico Di Trocchio

Questo volume delle dimensioni di un normale vocabolario colma finalmente una lacuna dell’editoria italiana. Non esisteva infatti finora un dizionario degli scienziati in lingua italiana di dimensioni e accessibilità analoghe al Chambers Concise Dictionary of Scientists, uscito in Inghilterra nell’89. Solo tra gli addetti ai lavori erano noti e usati i due dizionari della gloriosa Est Mondadori (Scienziati e tecnologi dalle origini al 1875, e Scienziati e tecnologi contemporanei). Questo dizionario della Zanichelli, quattro volte più grande del Chambers, si avvicina per completezza all’opera della Mondadori, che è però in più volumi, perché tenta di racchiudere in voci più sintetiche ma molto curate l’essenziale della biografia e dell’attività degli scienziati registrati. Nella maggior parte dei casi il tentativo è riuscito e quindi il lettore italiano può disporre oggi di un’opera compatta e ragionevolmente completa di biografie scientifiche.

A questo si aggiunge il particolare pregio del taglio critico altrove irreperibile. Di norma infatti le opere di consultazione non fanno neppure cenno agli aspetti problematici dell’attività degli scienziati e contribuiscono così ad aumentare il divario tra cultura scientifica e cultura in senso lato, presentando la ricerca con i toni asettici e impersonali dell’ufficialità, limitandosi all’illustrazione dei risultati finali e indulgendo occasionalmente all’aneddotica puramente oleografica come unica possibile forma di divulgazione. Chi legge in questo dizionario la voce Baltimore, David, troverà invece non solo una concisa ma essenziale illustrazione dei contributi di questo premio Nobel alla retrovirologia, ma anche un preciso e aggiornato riferimento allo scandalo nel quale è stato coinvolto, per aver firmato e difeso in modo inopportuno un articolo messo insieme con dati falsi (o comunque non scientificamente validi) da una sua collaboratrice. Analogamente le voci Gallo e Montagnier contengono anche un resoconto della lunga vicenda legale innescata dall’accusa di frode nei confronti del gruppo americano che si sarebbe appropriato, come pare accertato, di una scoperta e di un virus che appartenevano in realtà ai francesi.[NDR: operazione ideata per rendere più credibile l'esistenza del virus stesso]

Né questo taglio critico si limita ai problemi sociologici e per così dire esterni della scienza: a proposito dell’Aids, ad esempio, viene dato spazio anche alle tesi del virologo eretico Peter Duesberg, il quale sostiene da anni che non è il virus Hiv a causare la sindrome e, sullo stesso argomento, viene riferita l’ipotesi di Montagnier secondo il quale il virus ha bisogno di un cofattore per innescare il processo patologico. Chi si diletta di astrofisica potrà rendersi conto, leggendo inmodo incrociato le voci Gamow, Alpher, Penzias, Hoyle e Hubble, della reale solidità di quella che è considerata la prova principe a favore del Big Bang (la radiazione cosmica di fondo, o radiazione fossile), il cui valore – scoprirà – negli ultimi 40 anni è stato più volte manipolato per adattarlo alle misure sperimentali. A saper usare questo nuovo strumento, insomma, il lettore attento potrà non solo accostarsi più facilmente e più volentieri alla scienza ma evitare anche di abboccare a montature pubblicitarie molto poco scientifiche, come la recente “foto” del Big Bang bambino.

Certo il Dizionario sarebbe stato ancora più utile se non vi fosse qualche omissione o dimenticanza. Come mai, ad esempio, non si è trovato un posticino per Halton Arp, il grande critico dell’astrofisica contemporanea? E perché nella bella voce dedicata al Nobel Kary Mullis non c’è neppure un fugace accenno al sostegno che ha dato a Duesberg? Ad essere malevoli in alcuni casi potrebbe addirittura sembrare che si siano voluti evitare temi o controversie scottanti. La voce relativa al Nobel Gajdusek (scopritore della causa del kuru, malattia assimilabile al morbo della mucca pazza) è ad esempio stranamente breve: forse per il fatto che oggi nel mondo scientifico si mormora che il suo fu un Nobel ingiustificato e la sua scoperta sbagliata? Ed è forse per lo stesso motivo che manca del tutto la voce Prusiner, Nobel nel 1997, per la scoperta dei “prioni”, che sembrano essere la vera base di questo tipo di patologia? E a che cosa allude l’aggettivo “filantropo” attribuito a Gajdusek? Forse al fatto che dalla Nuova Guinea, dove compì le sue ricerche, si è portato in casa ed ha allevato parecchi ragazzi, alcuni dei quali lo hanno poi denunciato per pedofilia? Ma si tratta invece sicuramente di piccoli e normali incidenti di percorso. Nessuna recondita motivazione può essere ad esempio invocata per il fatto che le voci relative ai Nobel Jacques Monod e François Jacob o al nostro Cavalli Sforza siano più brevi di quella destinata a Procopio di Cesarea che forse in un dizionario di questo tipo poteva essere omessa senza danno.

Chi si lamenterà di più per omissioni o disomogeneità saranno però, probabilmente, le femministe e le studiose della cultura femminile. Saranno forse contente di registrare la presenza di Sophia Brahe, sorella dell’astronomo Tyge (Tico) e felicissime per l’ottima voce dedicata a Rosalind Franklin, nella quale giustamente si sostiene che la ricercatrice inglese meritava, come e forse più di Watson e Crick, il Nobel per la scoperta della struttura del DNA, ma resteranno contrariate dall’assenza di Barbara McClintock e delle quattro righe dedicate a Rosalind Yalow, che il Nobel l’hanno effettivamente avuto. Lettori maschi e femmine sono comunque pregati di essere ugualmente indulgenti: quello delle assenze e delle difformità è un rischio quasi inevitabile in opere di consultazione scritte necessariamente a più mani. Per quanto si sia scrupolosi e attenti qualcosa sfugge sempre. Per fortuna ci sono poi le riedizioni, che consentono correzioni e aggiustamenti, e un dizionario come questo, unico nel suo genere, sicuramente ne avrà.