Dr. Walter Gilbert, Professor in Molecular Biology, 1980 Nobel prize for chemistry:

"I would not be surprised if there were another cause of AIDS and even that HIV is not involved."(Omni June 1993)

"The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints." (Meditel 1990)

"[Duesberg] is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS." (Hippocrates Sept./Oct. 1988)

Legendary Nobel Prize winners David Baltimore and Walter Gilbert had been friends until Gilbert lined up against Baltimore in one of the great scientific fraud scandals of the century. But now Baltimore has been exonerated and it is Gilbert who is on the defensive.

THE OFFICE of Walter Gilbert, Harvard University's notoriously inscrutable Nobel Prize­winning molecular biologist, occupies a corner of the fourth floor of the Biological Laboratories. A 15-minute walk almost due north from Harvard Square, it affords an unspectacular view of several other science buildings. The office is adorned with fossils and various works of art that bespeak an erudite fondness for antiquities. Gilbert's bookshelves flaunt divergent interests. Biology textbooks and a forbidding tome on superstring theory sit next to James Gleick's Genius and Arthur David Kahn's The Education of Julius Caesar.

On a recent tour of his labs, the 64-year-old Gilbert, clad in a nondescript jacket and an open-collared shirt, walks down the corridor and points vaguely to rooms on either side. All are dark. None of his four postdoctoral students are present this midmorning. Gilbert, a relatively short man with a bald head circled by trim locks of graying curly hair, seems less comfortable in the lab, where his students carry out the experiments, than in his office, where he can think about Nature's mysterious ways in a more detached and lucid manner. There in his office, he has wrestled with some of biology's most weighty problems. Remarkably, he has often won.

Over the next five hours, his soft baritone rarely goes on for more than two or three sentences at a time. In response to a simple question, he pauses a full 15 seconds before responding, "I'm trying to think whether I think the, uh . . ." He pauses again, this time for an even longer period before adding, "Primarily the sort of . . ."

Gilbert is known as a man of few words, but even so, he obviously is not enjoying himself. Only after four requests did he agree to an interview, and even now he is taping the session lest his words be misconstrued.

The topic of conversation is scientific ethics. At first, it might seem a natural subject for Gilbert, since he is widely viewed in science as a paragon of integrity and has held himself out as a leading authority on scientific misconduct. Specifically, last year he was the star prosecution witness in a celebrated scientific fraud trial--the so-called David Baltimore affair--which the New York Times immortalized as a "scientific Watergate." The case drew nationwide attention because of allegations that Baltimore, whose discoveries in molecular biology had made him in 1975 one of the youngest Nobel Prize winners ever, had covered up fraud by a coauthor on an important immunology paper. For this supposed act, Baltimore has remained in a scientific purgatory for nearly a decade.

There is, however, a striking irony in Gilbert's public charges against Baltimore. For many years, the two men had been friends and occasional sailing partners. Broken friendships in science are nothing new, of course. In the fifties, with his brainchild H-bomb hanging in the balance, Edward Teller turned on a friend and fellow nuclear theorist by testifying that--despite his heroic wartime efforts as scientific director of the Manhattan Project--J. Robert Oppenheimer held left-wing beliefs that made him unworthy of continued national trust. To this day, many bitter scientists blame Teller for causing Oppenheimer to lose his security clearance.

Gilbert's turning against his old friend is a similar drama. Like the Teller-Oppenheimer saga, it unfolds against a backdrop of a national crisis, this time the leadership in the battle against AIDS. And as with the earlier dispute, history ultimately may judge the accuser more harshly than the accused. This past summer, Baltimore's coauthor was cleared of all wrongdoing by a federal adjudications panel--this in spite of Gilbert's testimony. With Baltimore's reputation restored, the Clinton administration announced last month that he would lead federal efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine.

Now some members of the scientific community have questioned whether Gilbert himself has lived up to the high ethical and scientific standards to which he has held Baltimore and others. Despite these questions, Gilbert still appears genuinely puzzled by the interviewer's interest in his views on ethics. "Why are you asking these questions at all?" he asks, blandly. For once, Gilbert's penetrating mind seems unable to deal with such a simple problem.

WALTER GILBERT was born of strong Harvard stock. His mother, Emma, studied child psychology at Radcliffe; his father, Richard, an early Keynesian theorist, taught economics there. A precocious science enthusiast as a child--an explosion from an attempt to synthesize hydrogen gas sent him to the hospital when he was 12--Gilbert later studied physics and chemistry at Harvard and Cambridge universities. He married into a noted family. His wife, Celia, a poet and artist, is the daughter of the late I.F. "Izzy" Stone, the legendary leftist journalist. The couple was a study in contrasts--he a restrained introvert, she a voluble extrovert.

In the late fifties, Gilbert formally entered the esoteric world of theoretical physics by landing an assistant professorship of physics at Harvard. Recognizing biology's explosive potential, however, he soon switched fields. Never one to be intimidated by a new subject, Gilbert made his first big mark in biology in 1961, with his elucidation of the mechanism by which proteins are made. Then, in 1966, came his remarkable discovery of a chemical known as the lac repressor. If DNA represented the book of life, the repressor led to insights into how each of the body's cells knows which page to read from the book.

As if these discoveries didn't already amount to a lifetime of achievement, Gilbert then went on to revolutionize the task of reading the genetic book by finding a way to sequence DNA 10,000 times faster than before. Gene sequencing that once took years of maddeningly tedious work could be accomplished in mere hours, making much of today's biotechnology industry economically feasible. In 1980, he shared the Nobel in chemistry for this sequencing work with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg.

By all accounts, Gilbert is an intimidating presence. His abrasive style of questioning peers as well as his own graduate students and postdocs has led to more than a few bitter feelings. Some of his department colleagues who are dazzled by Gilbert's scientific achievements are put off by his brusque manner. "There's basically only one point of view--that is his," says one, who requested anonymity. "And he doesn't always express it with much respect for people around him."

But others say Gilbert's demanding style is what makes his science so great. "From Wally I learned rigorous analysis, highly critical thinking, total commitment, how to decide important issues," says William Haseltine, a former student who is now chairman and chief executive officer of the Maryland-based Human Genome Sciences.

"If I had a problem and had one person to take it to, I would take it to Wally," Phillip Sharp, an MIT biologist and Nobel laureate, once remarked. "I consider him the brightest man I ever met."

In 1978, Gilbert and Sharp helped found the company Biogen, which was originally based in Geneva but later moved to Cambridge. This move was a pioneering effort that inspired many academic biologists to have closer ties with business, thereby fueling America's biotechnology industry boom. Gilbert steadfastly tried to avoid any conflicts of interest between his duties at Harvard and Biogen, yet, for the first time in his career, questions arose about Gilbert's priorities.

The major precipitating event was a press conference Gilbert and other members of Biogen's scientific advisory board held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel in January 1980. The "major announcement," as it was billed to reporters, was that scientists affiliated with the company had genetically prodded bacteria to make human interferon, a potentially lucrative anticancer drug. The market value of the stock issued by one of Biogen's minority shareholders (in which Gilbert held no ownership interest) temporarily soared by some $425 million.

One thing was unusual about the announcement of the discovery, however: It was made prior to the benefit of peer review, an essential element of credible science. As would later emerge, a similar discovery had already been published by a Japanese team, and Biogen had not performed the considerable research needed to show that a usable product could be made from its discovery. (Though royalties from interferon have been profitable for Biogen, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled in late 1995 that Biogen was not legally entitled to a patent for the product. The ruling is being appealed.)

All of this led federal investigators to consider whether the press conference had been staged as part of an illegal stock manipulation. Gilbert insists he made no money on the episode and, in any case, the investigators came back empty-handed. But many observers at the time criticized Gilbert and his Biogen colleagues for deviating from the norms of reporting findings in peer-reviewed journals. Stanford-based science writer Spyros Andreopoulos derisively dubbed it "gene cloning by press conference" in an article he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a Science magazine story about the incident, Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University expert on conflicts of interest in academia, was reported to be fretting about the "demise in scientific integrity when corporate funds have an undue influence over academic research."

After the furor died down the following year, Gilbert traded his turtlenecks for suits and ties, leaving academia altogether to become CEO of Biogen. Once again, his massive intellect was a dominant presence. "I believe Wally is truly a genius and that term is overused," says a former executive of the company. "In some ways he is scary smart."

Gilbert became a rich man: At its peak his stock was valued at $12 million. Nevertheless, he did not fare terribly well as a leader in the corporate world. In December 1984, amid criticisms that Gilbert's academic approach slowed the progress of products to market and with the company's stock foundering, he resigned.

By then, Baltimore and Gilbert had been friends for more than two decades. The week Gilbert left Biogen, Baltimore and his wife, Alice Huang, were planning to sail to the islands of Tonga. So when Baltimore asked them to join the sailing expedition, Gilbert, his wife, Celia, and their daughter Kate eagerly agreed.

THE SOUTH PACIFIC was a perfect blue on that winter trip in 1984. The clear sky stood in sharp contrast with the storm that would eventually end Gilbert's and Baltimore's friendship.

A short, bearded, and bespectacled man with an eloquent and sometimes aristocratic manner, Baltimore, then 46, was an avid sailor. He excelled at many things and had dabbled in business and Democratic politics. Like Gilbert, he was well on the road to becoming a multimillionaire, having helped found two companies, Palo Alto's Systemix and Waltham's Collaborative Research.

Gilbert had always been an inspiration to Baltimore. "For many years," he says, "I considered Wally as smart as anyone else in the field. He was one of my real heroes." The two had become good friends, although Gilbert was not inclined to share intimate secrets. They saw each other at parties and occasionally sailed together.

Six years Gilbert's junior, Baltimore had won science's ultimate prize, the Nobel, in 1975, five years before Gilbert. Baltimore was recognized for his codiscovery of reverse transcriptase, a substance that overthrew the "central dogma" of molecular biology--namely, that the DNA's pages were etched in immutable stone. Instead, he found that the book of life was written in movable type. The finding, only one of several major discoveries from Baltimore's lab in the seventies, led to a basic understanding of retroviruses, without which the cause of AIDS might still be a mystery. "David may be the greatest scientist of my generation," gushes David Botstein, a leading geneticist at Stanford University.

Then as now, both scientists have been held in the highest esteem by their colleagues. "There are Nobels and Nobels," says Robert Cook-Deegan, a scientist who is a leading writer on genetics. "They are both way up there."

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, associate vice president for research at Northwestern University, who has worked in the laboratories of both men, says that "they're both critical, demanding people." And Baltimore was no less interested than Gilbert in ethical behavior in science. "He was one of the few to talk about these things," Villa-Komaroff says. "In group meetings, we would get examples of 'this is appropriate, this is not.'"

Adds William Haseltine, who also studied in both laboratories: "I learned with both of them that data is sacred. They both had an enormous appetite for original data and were data driven."

For all the brilliance of the two men, however, their careers took different directions. While Gilbert had his difficulties in the corporate world, Baltimore stayed in academia and proved to be an able administrator. In 1982 he became founding director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT and was instrumental in building it from an empty lot into one of the world's most renowned centers for research in molecular biology and genetics. When he left for Tonga, Baltimore was still Whitehead's director.

On that trip, Baltimore captained one of two boats. Normand Smith, Baltimore's long-time friend, adviser, and personal attorney, skippered the other with Gilbert. "It was the Smith family and the Gilberts, who couldn't of course be more opposite," recalls Smith. "We get up at five and sail, and they get up at noon and read all day."

Either during that trip or soon after, Baltimore asked whether Gilbert might be willing to come to the Whitehead, with a corresponding faculty position at MIT. The experience must have been humbling for Gilbert. Baltimore, who had always looked up to him, was now offering a helping hand. Baltimore must have known that prospects for the appointment were slim, despite Gilbert's vaunted status. "At the time," notes one MIT scientist, "we were a strong department, and we had a strong urge to hire young people." Even though Gilbert was one of the most respected biologists in the world, the MIT faculty didn't bite when Baltimore floated his name.

Gilbert says that was not a big deal because he had already scored an impressive offer from Harvard. In 1985, he was named chairman of the cellular and developmental biology department, and in 1987 he was named a "university professor," Harvard's highest honor. The latter position, which gave him an extra pot of money to spend, designated him as one of only 14 "brilliant and imaginative men" who had "roving commissions" and reported only to the president. One of the advantages of this privileged position was that Gilbert was now exempt from petty academic politics.

Despite such perquisites, Gilbert struggled in rebuilding his lab. The number of all-star students he had once attracted declined, and his publication record slowed to a modest level. The 1994 Science Citation Index, a publication that is one measure of the influence of scientific work, reveals that only a small fraction of the references to Gilbert in science journals have anything to do with original lab work in the last 10 years. "He had a very hard time getting back into an academic research lab," says one colleague. "It just didn't click."

ONE REASON FOR Gilbert's increasing difficulty in attracting bright young stars was his inability to focus on his laboratory. Not only had he been away from a lab for five years, but this was his first full year in academia since winning the Nobel, and the demands on his time were overwhelming. Because of his chairmanship and privileged status as university professor, no one questioned whether he was giving enough time to his academic responsibilities. But department members complained that Gilbert often spent entire weeks out of town, attending conferences in Europe or consulting with private businesses.

By 1986, Gilbert's attention was focused on an emerging enterprise known as the Human Genome Project. The project's goal was to decipher the entire genetic code of human beings, a massive undertaking that would, among other things, give scientists their best weapon yet to fight dozens of diseases with genetic origins.

Gilbert was "the most articulate advocate of the Genome Project," says Charles DeLisi, one of the original leaders of that federal research effort. And, adds DeLisi, who is now dean of Boston University's engineering school, one of its greatest opponents was David Baltimore. He feared it would politicize biomedical science and bleed the federal research budget dry. From DeLisi's perspective as a project booster, however, Baltimore was simply imagining "a number of really incorrect, inaccurate, fantasy-type plots."

Some of Baltimore's friends speculate that this dispute is what led to the end of the friendship between Baltimore and Gilbert. But the two Nobelists insist that the disagreement was nothing out of the ordinary. "Friends have different opinions on things," says Gilbert.

Eventually the Genome Project did proceed, and in 1990 Gilbert's lab was awarded a $6-million federal grant to develop better sequencing techniques. But eventually that grant was not renewed and his lab again fell on hard times.

As Gilbert's scientific star dimmed, Baltimore's brightened. With startling success, his lab at MIT began to unravel such questions as to how the immune system is regulated, how genetic instructions are carried out, and how information travels from one end of a cell to another. He also continued to be one of the leading authorities on retroviruses.

By 1984, as the AIDS epidemic was spreading through sex, drugs, and blood transfusions to hundreds of communities nationwide, French and American teams discovered that a retrovirus--later to become known as HIV--caused AIDS. A blood test that recognized antibodies to the virus successfully identified people who, with very few exceptions, would later come down with the disease. Baltimore's expertise on retroviruses instantly made him a leading authority on AIDS.

Gilbert, of course, is not viewed in the same light. But much to the horror of health officials, then as now Gilbert has lent his prestige to theories that HIV is not necessarily the cause of AIDS. Gilbert stops short of saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but he insists that it is still an open question.

"As far as I'm concerned," says Baltimore, "the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is as good as the evidence that any disease is caused by any agent, and better than most. It's not a difficult issue. It's not a contentious issue among any reasonable people."

In 1989, Baltimore left MIT and was appointed president of the prestigious Rockefeller University, the New York City institution that had become a mecca for biological research. By that time, however, he was already encumbered by the nagging issue of a scandal that came to be known as the Baltimore affair. For many observers, the Baltimore affair has come to symbolize much that is wrong with the scientific establishment--its insularity, its arrogance, its mindless hierarchy, its lack of integrity.

THE AFFAIR BEGAN in 1986 with a paper Baltimore published in the journal Cell with MIT immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari. A Brazilian-born chain smoker of Japanese descent, Imanishi-Kari was a respected scientist, though her lab was often as frazzled and sloppy as her syntax. Baltimore had heard of Imanishi-Kari's work through her former mentor, the noted German immunologist Klaus Rajewsky, and when she arrived in the United States, Baltimore invited her to join him in a series of experiments.

The resulting paper reported that mice injected with a particular sequence of DNA, known as a transgene, showed surprising changes in their immune systems. The authors explained that these bizarre effects could be evidence that the chemicals of the immune system were connected in a vast network--a highly controversial theory.

Baltimore had confidence in the paper's results because his lab used different techniques to confirm Imanishi-Kari's serology. "When she told me a given sample would contain something that would relate to either the transgene or the normal gene, it did, and so I was convinced her work was telling us the right story," Baltimore says. "If she said, 'Here's a sample that's going to have no transgene in it, and it had a lot of transgene in it, then I suddenly would have said, 'Well let's take a look at the serology.' But I never felt the serology was likely to be at fault because it gave answers that checked out when we looked at the molecules."

A feisty Dublin-raised crusader named Margot O'Toole, who worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Imanishi-Kari's lab, was less sure of the paper's accuracy. Some of her primary concerns would prove to be trivial, or simply wrong. But her overall point--that there were significant errors in the paper--turned out to be valid. Finding herself unable to talk with Imanishi-Kari, with whom she found civil communication increasingly difficult, O'Toole informed university administrators of her concerns.

The rest is an oft-told history. But almost without exception until this past year, it has been one told only from O'Toole's perspective. It is also a history that has changed markedly over time. At first, O'Toole told others that Imanishi-Kari had simply made a few errors in the Cell paper. But over a period of several years, with goading from federal investigators, O'Toole came to believe that Imanishi-Kari had committed fraud.

As O'Toole's view of events became more sinister, so too did her view of Baltimore. According to O'Toole's most recent explanation of the affair, first advanced in 1991, Imanishi-Kari, in front of several people, including Baltimore, had confessed that she had no data for the central claim of the paper, and Baltimore had promptly set about to cover up the scandal. O'Toole went on to assert that this decision set in motion a chain of events that led Imanishi-Kari to fabricate more data before her alleged duplicity was finally uncovered by federal investigators.

Baltimore now says that the transformation in O'Toole's story--disputed in its particulars by virtually every other witness, from students to scientists to academic administrators to government officials--can be explained by congressional power politics.

High-profile congressional investigations, be it the Baltimore affair or Whitewater, can be most aptly described as theatrical drama. Before the play even begins, the heroes and villains are chosen, the plot twists planned, and the finale carefully scripted. Unfortunately for Baltimore, the play's director and writer, congressman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, seemed to enjoy big stars and macabre endings. From 1981 to 1994, Dingell chaired a panel of inquisitors known as the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Largely unknown outside the Beltway, Dingell had a reputation in Washington as one of the most powerful members of Congress. Among scientists, he was the most feared. Indeed in 1989, during congressional hearings into another matter, Dingell argued that congressional aides were authorized by the U.S. Constitution to break any law necessary for the conduct of an investigation.

TWO MONTHS LATER, in May 1989, Baltimore was summoned to a congressional hearing. Three panels of scientists had already reviewed the matter and cleared Imanishi-Kari of wrongdoing. But at his hearing, Dingell disclosed a secret weapon: forensic analysis by the U.S. Secret Service purportedly proving Imanishi-Kari's data to be fake. What Dingell didn't reveal was the integral role his own staff had played in the creation of that forensic evidence. As Secret Service agents would later confess on tape to shocked federal health officials, Dingell aides told the agents which evidence to keep and which to ignore. (A Dingell spokesman denies providing any direction to the Secret Service.)

When his turn came to speak, Baltimore responded politely but firmly, objecting to the "manner in which this investigation has been pursued." An investigator "in the service of this subcommittee," he noted as one example, had made the "loathsome" comparison between science fraud and the Nazi Holocaust. Baltimore excused his failure to review all Imanishi-Kari's data, and hence catch any possible fraud, by saying she was a peer. "A collaborative effort of this sort," he testified, "requires a high degree of mutual trust, or collaboration will break down and no benefit will come from the work." Imanishi-Kari, he concluded, was a "victim" who "deserves my support."

It was, however, the final moments of the hearing that were most memorable and would later come to haunt Baltimore's career. As the hearings neared their close, Dingell launched into a final fierce assault on Baltimore, saying that the scientist had made a "rather ringing attack upon this committee" by comparing the chairman to Hitler.

In response, Baltimore rose up in angry and eloquent defiance. "I was charged with fraud!" he exclaimed. He went on to point out that the reference to Hitler was directed at himself, not Dingell, and by none other than the investigator working for Dingell's subcommittee.

"I wasn't planning anything dramatic," Baltimore says today. "In fact, I wasn't planning anything specific. I simply wasn't going there to eat crow. . . . I had absolutely no idea where it was going to go nor how momentous my decision was. It was sort of a gut reaction that you back what you believe.

"I don't regret it because I don't think I could have lived with myself if I had done anything else," Baltimore goes on. "I certainly regret a lot of the outcomes from it, but not to the extent that I believe I should have done otherwise."

Wally Gilbert observed the unfolding scandal from afar. Yet Gilbert had already begun to take sides. Many scientists applauded Baltimore for standing up to Dingell, whom some viewed as a latter-day Joe McCarthy, a comparison intimated in a 1988 editorial in Science magazine. But Gilbert was dismayed by such views. "Lots of people who hate Dingell were in the defense industries which he took after," he says today. "So whenever I find scientists saying, 'Gee, Dingell is a bad guy,' I know they are mouthing almost a Republican propaganda. They are not looking carefully at what he is doing; they are not reading the actual testimony."

Underlying Gilbert's defense of Dingell was his fear that science funding would be hurt by a poor relationship with Congress. Dingell chaired the committee authorizing federal biomedical-research spending, including Gilbert's vital Human Genome Project. Gilbert says it was not so much his own funding he was worried about. "In part, I think that's had a very pernicious effect on American science, the way he [Baltimore] effectively convinced scientists that Congress was their enemy," Gilbert says. "And this is just a profound misreading of the political forces."

But Gilbert's primary concern was that Baltimore had offended science itself. To Gilbert, good science was built on perpetual skepticism, a rigorous questioning of all data, all assumptions, all conclusions. As Gilbert saw it, the Cell paper did not pass this test; moreover, Baltimore's suggestion at the hearing that he was duty-bound to "trust" Imanishi-Kari was an affront to science. "I feel personally insulted by that statement; it is totally untrue," Gilbert once exploded to a reporter from Omni magazine. "Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself."

Had Baltimore been more skeptical about the Cell paper, none of this would have happened, Gilbert felt. "I do not particularly believe that it was in a sense fraudulent in its inception, but I believe it involves misconduct in the sense of tremendous carelessness behind it," Gilbert told several peers in an informal taped meeting in 1991. "And my actual belief about the paper is that the immunology was so badly done as to be just wrong, and that the immunology was used to convince the molecular-biology group the cells were behaving in a certain way, and the molecular biology was actually done badly and used to convince Thereza that things were working."

To many scientists, Gilbert's statement would be really quite radical. This standard--that "tremendous carelessness" equates to "misconduct"--fell well outside misconduct's legal definition, which, according to federal regulations, specifically excludes "honest error or honest differences in interpretations or judgments of data." In 1991, Gilbert linked misconduct to self-deception in an opinion piece he wrote for Genetic Engineering News in which he asserted that misconduct "typically involves deceiving oneself about one's own experiments."

Such statements dismayed many of his peers. "Though Gilbert's scientific papers are models of clarity, the Baltimore case has tempted him to additional surprisingly loose remarks," concluded his late Harvard colleague Bernard Davis, after analyzing Gilbert's public statements for a book he was writing on the affair.

MIT immunologist Herman Eisen, who has discussed misconduct with Gilbert, disagrees with the way Gilbert seemed to equate self-deception and misconduct. "If you raise self-deception to the level of misconduct, you will find misconduct to be very common," Eisen says. "You can argue, and many people do, that all of science is a self-deception . . . The guys who thought that everything revolved around the Earth were engaged in self-deception in a way . . . but there certainly wasn't fraud there."

For his part, Gilbert today seems to back away from his hard-line point of view. He disclaimed it entirely in a recent interview with Boston Magazine. "I don't see tremendous carelessness as misconduct," he said. Nevertheless, it is still clear that he is no fan of the narrower legal definition of misconduct, which requires an intent to deceive others. "I'm not sure I use the word fraud quite that sharply in the sense that I would say, If you didn't have an intent to deceive, I wouldn't call it fraud. I'm not sure what I'm going to call it," he elaborates in the interview, pausing. "Now it's getting a little abstract"--he pauses again--"but if I tell you a lie, you can infer from the fact that I didn't label it a lie that I had an intent to deceive you."

From Gilbert's perspective, one of the most damning falsehoods in the Cell paper involved the paper's Table 2, in which questions were raised about whether individual cells or groups of cells had been tested for the presence of antibodies and whether a characteristic of the antibody known as the isotype had been determined. The paper said individual cells had been tested; Imanishi-Kari quickly admitted that groups of cells, not individuals, had been tested and that the detailed isotyping was supposed to refer to Table 3, not Table 2.

By 1989, three scientific panels had found the errors to be significant but otherwise unremarkable. But not Gilbert. In court testimony he gave in 1995 about the Baltimore affair, Gilbert asserted that these errors constituted "one of the key fraudulent elements" in the Cell paper.

WALLY GILBERT CAN stake out such an unyielding position because in his own publication history he says he has never had to publish an erratum. "I do know of one error," he offers, "but before I published an erratum, somebody said it was wrong."

But others have raised more serious questions about his work. Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who is angered that Gilbert never talked to her about her controversial work, points to one paper Gilbert published in 1984 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which claimed to answer the puzzling question of how immune cells could produce two different kinds of antibodies. Dipankar Sen, a former postdoctoral fellow in Gilbert's lab, acknowledges that he spent about 18 months trying to replicate the experiments but got nowhere. "I had difficulty getting off the ground," he says. "I left the project assuming my competence did not match up."

Sen was not alone in his failure. "It's hard to be sure it's wrong but nobody has been able to repeat it," says Janet Stavnezer, a University of Massachusetts Medical Center immunologist who was asked to review the paper for this story. A specialist in this area, she asserts that the curious numbers reported in the paper should have been a tip-off to Gilbert that his lab might have done something wrong. Given that Gilbert was in a field not his own, Stavnezer says, "I think he didn't know what he was doing."

Today, the paper, though unreplicated, remains in the scientific literature uncorrected. Gilbert acknowledges this, but he insists that since he doesn't know where he went wrong, if anywhere, he had no duty to correct or retract it. For her part, Stavnezer says that she thinks Gilbert did nothing wrong ethically in handling that paper. Ordinarily, occasional blunders are forgiven as a pitfall of doing cutting-edge science.

IN HAVING HIS OWN NAME on a flawed paper, Baltimore, however, was not so lucky. After Dingell's hearings, the Baltimore affair unfolded with a certain inevitability. As Baltimore became more and more isolated, many luminaries in science were disappointed that such a talented policymaker and administrator was no longer being considered for top leadership positions. Without the scandal of the affair, surmises MIT Nobel laureate Phil Sharp, "MIT would have offered him the presidency."

There were even bigger stakes. Playwright Larry Kramer, founder of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, describes how he set out in the late eighties to find another Robert Oppenheimer for a modern Manhattan Project to conquer the disease. David Baltimore's name, he says, "kept coming up no matter where you looked." But thanks to the scandal, it was just as quickly shot down.

"He was the only person--and I mean that--who seemed to have the unalloyed respect of everybody," Kramer says. "They might not have liked his personality, they might not have liked where he parted his hair, or one thing or another. But nobody had anything but extreme praise and admiration for his brains and his ability to get things done. Now that's unheard of in this world."

The final blow to Baltimore's career took place on March 21, 1991. That morning, he awoke to find his own dour, bearded face gracing the front page of the New York Times. The headline, appearing above the fold, dealt a crushing blow: Crucial Research Data in Report Biologist Signed Are Held Fake. The story reported that a confidential report by a federal agency now known as the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) had reversed the three previous scientific reviews to find Imanishi-Kari guilty of wholesale fabrication of data. Dingell's forensic evidence figured heavily in the report.

The Times story quoted the ORI as saying that Baltimore's defense of his colleague was "difficult to comprehend." What's more, the story reported that he was going to ask that the Cell paper be retracted and said that the defense of the paper was now "up to Thereza Imanishi-Kari."

The draft report and his retraction of the Cell paper were the beginning of the end for Baltimore. For more than two decades, he had roosted at the top of his profession. Now he was struggling to hold on.

THE SAME DAY the Times story appeared, Gilbert received a Federal Express package from Washington. In it was a copy of the ORI draft report, each page stamped "draft" and "confidential." He made copies of portions of the report and circulated them to members of his department at Harvard.

With the ORI report widely distributed, and Baltimore badly bleeding, Gilbert assailed him in Science, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Insight magazine, among other publications. Nothing Baltimore did seemed to satisfy Gilbert. Not Baltimore's retraction of the paper, not his distancing himself from Imanishi-Kari. Not even when Baltimore wrote an extraordinary public apology to Margot O'Toole--saying he had been "too willing to accept Imanishi-Kari's explanations, and to excuse discrepancies as mere sloppiness"--did Gilbert relent.

Baltimore's apology to O'Toole reminds me, Gilbert told the New York Times, "of that moment in the movie Casablanca where Claude Rains stands in the bar and says, 'There is gambling going on here? I'm shocked! I'm shocked!' There is very little admission in it."

Gilbert's reaction painfully underscored for Baltimore how little he could do to satisfy his critics and how wrong he was to even try. "In that [apology] letter, I tried to walk a fine line between saying things I didn't believe and saying things I did believe," Baltimore explains. "The draft report had made a difference, but the difference was solely a difference of perception. There were no facts in there that I didn't know about. However, the language in it left so little doubt that I didn't think that I could keep on defending the past. In my heart, I did not believe--do not believe--that Thereza did anything wrong." Indeed, a year later, Baltimore announced he would retract his retraction of the Cell paper. (Upon hearing this, Gilbert exclaimed to a Science reporter, "It's such foolishness I can't believe it!")

By the summer of 1991, however, several months following the ORI draft's release, even Baltimore's supporters began to question why he had not been more skeptical, more willing to admit errors in the Cell paper, less arrogant in his reply to criticism. "David, for whatever reasons, wound up always making legalistic responses," one friend explains. "Scientists, as you know, don't like legalisms. . . . David in a certain sense misjudged all of us at that stage, and I remember trying to get that across to him personally and felt so ineloquent that I failed."

Baltimore's weakening support seemed to further energize his critics. Each Friday, the biochemistry and molecular biology department at Harvard held informal lunches, which served as chat sessions. Gilbert, though head of the sister cellular and developmental department, began to attend with some regularity, and talk of the Baltimore affair often arose.

Not surprisingly, Harvard's science faculty became a hotbed of activism in the Baltimore affair. Scientists of considerable reputation--John Edsall, Mark Ptashne, Paul Doty, Tom Maniatis, John Cairns, Konrad Bloch, and even the legendary James Watson, a former Harvard professor and Nobel Prize­winning discoverer of the structure of DNA--joined in with criticism of Baltimore. Gilbert was one of the key voices shaping the conventional wisdom that Baltimore had badly mishandled the situation.

Harvard and MIT had always been rivals, though the participants insist that no such rivalry motivated their concerns about Baltimore. Still, the broken friendships among biologists of the two schools inspired Gilbert and others to compare it to the infamous Dreyfus affair that had once divided France. At MIT, critics of Baltimore became known as the Harvard Mafia.

Baltimore was at a loss to understand what exactly motivated such antagonism, and nobody presented so much of an enigma to him as Wally Gilbert. "I've thought about it a lot over the years and have come to nothing useful," says Baltimore. "I honestly don't know what is driving Wally." And never did he call Gilbert to ask. "Wally is a very closed person," he explains, while acknowledging, "Maybe I should have."

Some figured it was Baltimore's early opposition to the Genome Project that had so soured Gilbert. Some wonder whether it was because Gilbert did not get the job at Whitehead. Others consider it jealousy over Baltimore's fantastic success--as a researcher, an administrator, and a policymaker--while Gilbert struggled in both research and business.

One of Gilbert's Harvard colleagues, bacterial physiologist Bernard Davis, believed a clash in scientific styles was to blame. Harvard biologists like Gilbert favored "what one might call pure molecular biology," Davis wrote for an unpublished book on the Baltimore affair before he succumbed to prostate cancer three years ago. MIT biologists such as Baltimore, on the other hand, had been "applying the tools of molecular biology to complex cellular functions at higher levels of organization--studies of cancer, the immune system, embryonic development, or viral infection. For some years those at Harvard who had been so successful in 'pure' molecular biology discouraged the department from moving into these 'messy' areas."

Gilbert rejects the idea that he was motivated by any extraneous concerns and asserts that his comments about Baltimore "do not constitute turning on a colleague." Others close to him felt that he was publicly standing up to Baltimore out of a deep sense of principle.

Whatever the cause, the drumbeat of disapproval in the months following the release of the draft ORI report made it increasingly difficult for Baltimore to act in any kind of leadership capacity. In December 1991 he reluctantly resigned as president of Rockefeller University.

Humiliated, Baltimore took refuge in his Rockefeller laboratory until he returned to MIT in June 1994. "I don't think Dave's science suffered one iota," marvels biochemist Paul Berg, who shared the Nobel Prize with Gilbert. "He made major, major breakthroughs and contributions."

DAVID BALTIMORE SEES his own fall as representative of how the government's misconduct inquiries had run amuck, how all scientists were vulnerable. But Gilbert scoffs at such ideas. Baltimore, not the government, "destroyed himself." Had Baltimore been more honest, more willing to accept criticism, none of this need have occurred, Gilbert believes.

However, in 1993, a year and a half after Gilbert had helped to stoke the fires of the Baltimore affair, another curious episode began to unfold. But for the fact that it lacked publicity, the Gilbert affair, as it might be known, played out in eerie parallel to the Baltimore affair. The Gilbert affair involved a striped aquarium denizen known as the zebrafish and a doctoral student named Carl Fulwiler. Zebrafish have become important to science because they are the first vertebrate organism that allows easy study of how various genes influence embryonic development. In preparation for his Ph.D. thesis, Fulwiler was to use zebrafish as part of a long-range project to study the development of the eye.

The Nobel laureate was unusually impressed with Fulwiler, a tall, confident, bearded man who had already received a medical degree in psychiatry. Even though Fulwiler's specialty was quite distant from molecular biology, Gilbert granted his student unusual responsibility and freedom to carry out experiments. Fulwiler's first task was to create genetically mutant fish, and by the end of 1992, he believed he had done just that. In December 1992, Gilbert and his protégé submitted a paper to Nature, the leading scientific journal. It took only a month for the paper's claims to unravel.

Reviewing data after the paper had been submitted but before it had been accepted, a female postdoctoral fellow in Gilbert's lab found that not all of the zebrafish reported in the article had the mutant DNA they were supposed to. Had that been all there was to the episode, Gilbert could have rectified matters simply by retracting the paper in a private letter to Nature's editor. But there was a complication: The postdoctoral fellow also discovered two versions of one of Fulwiler's data pages. The earlier version had a blank area on the page where the data belonged; the later version had data on that page. Concerned that Fulwiler had fabricated data, Gilbert himself called for a faculty probe. The inquiry was headed by Doug Melton, one of Gilbert's biologist colleagues.

Fulwiler's explanation was that he was simply trying to correct an omission from his notes with genuine data that was located elsewhere, in records of the fish facility. His failure to properly annotate the page with a new date was misguided, he asserted, but he had no ill intent. "I acted impulsively," he explained to the Melton committee. "In that brief moment, I lulled myself into thinking that because I believed it was correct, the information belonged there on that page. If I had thought about it, however, I would have seen that without the contemporaneous documentation, I couldn't insert that information retroactively."

Fulwiler also noted that some of the zebrafish that had been mistakenly identified as mutants were the responsibility of another researcher in Gilbert's lab. Fulwiler used this fact to bolster his argument that the scientific misjudgments leading to the manuscript's errors were in part Gilbert's fault.

Nevertheless, the faculty investigative panel's confidential draft report found Fulwiler guilty of misconduct for altering his notebook and by his "repeated and knowing misrepresentation of data." It also accused him of being "purposefully evasive and untruthful" to the committee.

Gilbert did not escape criticism. "Although we find no misconduct on Professor Gilbert's part," the draft report read, echoing the ORI's judgments about David Baltimore, "the committee finds it surprising and regrettable that the manuscript was submitted to Nature without Professor Gilbert, as principal investigator, checking the central molecular data more closely and systematically."

The draft report added, "We do not excuse Professor Gilbert's failure to supervise Dr. Fulwiler more closely or to examine the primary data more critically." Gilbert maintains that the supervisory procedures he used were adequate. "Without the benefit of hindsight," Gilbert says, "I had no reason to doubt [Fulwiler's] integrity or the results he reported, and thus no reason to single him out for what would have been extraordinary scrutiny."

But the committee's ire stemmed in part from its discovery of the facts surrounding the dismissal of a young Italian technician named Ugo Giambarella. Long before the paper was published, Giambarella ran Southern blots, a common lab technique. The blots, he thought, showed that Fulwiler and Gilbert were mistaken about whether some of the fish were full mutants.

Gilbert asserts that he examined the data carefully and dismissed it because of what he believed to be contamination. "When I saw the blots, I thought they were of such low quality that there was nothing to be done with them," Gilbert explains matter-of-factly. "And after a few weeks of that, I told Carl that he probably should fire Ugo and try to get somebody else."

This last act--the firing of Giambarella--was potentially controversial. Gilbert, however, rejects any suggestion that by encouraging Fulwiler to fire Giambarella, he was silencing a whistleblower--because Giambarella never came to him with objections about the data. "I suppose he could be a whistleblower had he gone and blown a whistle," Gilbert explains. "He could have come to me and said, 'Look, there's something wrong with this data. Do something about it.'"

Given the politics of the situation, perhaps Giambarella didn't have much of a chance. In a research lab, someone in Fulwiler's position is not likely to hear the objections of a lowly technician over the authoritative declarations of a Nobel laureate, particularly when that Nobelist's scientific opinions are as highly regarded as Wally Gilbert's.

But Giambarella says the problems should have been evident in the data, and that an alert postdoc saved Gilbert from the ultimate embarrassment of retracting a paper. Her questions "saved Walter Gilbert because had the paper gone into the publication, then Walter Gilbert would have been in the same position as David Baltimore," the technician says. "He was giving his whole blessing for this paper to go into publication."

The Melton committee's report said nothing about the quality of the blots. However, at least one committee member privately concurred with Giambarella's view that the blots indicated that some of the zebrafish were not mutants at all--even though Gilbert thought they were.

THE MELTON COMMITTEE'S draft investigative report, which contained criticisms of Gilbert, landed on the desk of Jeremy Knowles, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and one of Gilbert's few close friends at Harvard. As Baltimore had done with Imanishi-Kari, Gilbert gave Fulwiler advice and provided him with the phone number of an attorney. The lawyer was Norm Smith, Gilbert's former sailing partner and David Baltimore's personal counsel. Fulwiler might never have required a lawyer had Gilbert not been so judgmental of his old friend David Baltimore. "Precisely because of Wally's involvement in the Baltimore affair," Fulwiler says, "this was blown up into something it wasn't."

Gilbert believes Fulwiler's amendment of the data pages was wrong, but he agrees that the Melton committee leapt to extreme conclusions. "I don't think he tried to deceive the committee," Gilbert said in his interview for this story. "I thought many of the things the committee thought were exaggerated."

But Gilbert mostly quarreled with the committee's treatment of himself given that it was only impaneled to look at misconduct, not his own alleged inattention to scientific details.

The committee eventually dropped its editorializing about Gilbert's alleged failures. The final report--still confidential--stated simply that "some testimony touched on questions of laboratory management and graduate student supervision and some members of the committee felt it was appropriate to draw the attention of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences"--Gilbert's close friend--"to these issues."

Most important, the report concluded that in altering the data page Fulwiler had engaged in misconduct. It was passed on for approval to the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the agency handling the Baltimore affair. Ordinarily, such a case as the zebrafish matter would have been open-and-shut given the agency's predilection to convict. As one example, the agency had found a Cleveland scientist guilty of misconduct for what an appeal board later characterized as a single obvious and insignificant typographical error in a grant application.

Because of its desperate need for scientific respectability in the Baltimore affair, however, ORI was in a dilemma. Scientists mostly scoffed at the charges against Imanishi-Kari. Even one of the agency's own immunology advisers warned that the most basic charge against Imanishi-Kari simply made no sense, making "one wonder whether the rest of the accusations may be false."

The irony of course was that the ORI needed Gilbert's testimony--and the great credibility his stature would provide--in the upcoming Baltimore trial, but a member of Gilbert's lab had also been charged with misconduct.

Ultimately, even though Harvard's committee had concluded that Fulwiler had engaged in misconduct, the ORI rejected the charges against him, thereby keeping them confidential. But Lyle Bivens, ORI's director during the Fulwiler probe, asserts that his office's decision was in no way influenced by the impending trial in the Baltimore affair.

The final ORI report, which bore the mark "Confidential/Sensitive," marshaled several arguments why Fulwiler could not have intended to deceive anyone with his alteration. One explanation was that Fulwiler had reason to believe his amendments were based on real--if scientifically flawed--data and that he made the alterations obvious to the naked eye.

Still, Gilbert, ever the hard-liner on matters of misconduct, wasn't convinced by Fulwiler's vindication. In fact, he was as harsh a critic of a member of his own lab as he was of Imanishi-Kari in the Baltimore affair. "All I can do is smile about that [Fulwiler's vindication]," he says. "That particular moment is a clear intent to deceive. . . . You can't make what he did disappear."

AS THE ZEBRAFISH episode unfolded behind closed doors, Wally Gilbert showed no awareness that it could lead to perception problems. As part of his continued crusade against misconduct in science, Gilbert taught an ethics class, Biology 230, with the Baltimore affair taking up two weeks of classroom discussion. He also held himself out as an expert witness in court.

That Gilbert testified as an expert ethicist disturbed at least one observer. "I think the world of Celia and Kate, and I like Wally," says Norm Smith, who served as an attorney to both Baltimore and Fulwiler. "But in this thing I have no idea where he thinks he's coming from." At Kate Gilbert's 1995 wedding, Smith adds, "he proudly announced to me that he was doing a lot of testifying in misconduct cases."

"I didn't say this, but I thought, 'What a crock of shit,'" says Smith. "I just saved his bacon with this Fulwiler thing. I'm convinced that if I hadn't gotten the Fulwiler report straightened out, he would have been next on the list. And I know if ORI accepted that report, they would have gone right after him."

Gilbert served as an expert witness on misconduct in other cases. One case in which he successfully testified involved an Eli Lilly Company patent. The stakes were enormous. The suit was for $600 million, and the accused researchers were all major scientists, including the chairman of a major biotechnology company. The Gilbert affair received no mention, and the judge sided with Gilbert and Lilly.

Word of the Gilbert affair did, however, make its way to attorneys for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a biotech company called Calgene, which were partners in a patent dispute over the Flavr Savr tomato technology. In April 1995, Gilbert was scheduled to testify for the opposing side, Enzo Biochem. At issue, once again, was the integrity of the laboratory of an esteemed researcher, this time molecular biologist Harold Weintraub. "He's a man who's regarded with almost awe by his colleagues," says Maury Fox, an MIT scientist. Gilbert's accusations were technically against Weintraub's postdoctoral student, but "everybody understood that attack was on Hal Weintraub," says Matthew Kenney, an attorney for the Hutch, as the cancer institute is commonly known.

Weintraub's hitherto impeccable reputation was only one reason Hutch researchers considered the charges so unseemly. The other was that Weintraub was in no position to defend himself. He had died of brain cancer only weeks before the trial. Gilbert never spoke with Weintraub or the postdoctoral student before testifying because, he says, the postdoc was out of the country and Weintraub was sick. Nevertheless, when he ascended the witness stand, Gilbert testified that the data from Weintraub's lab had been "trimmed and cooked and forged." The essence of his charge was that only data that supported the paper had been reported.

To Hutch researcher Gerry Smith, the charges seemed to reflect too rigid a view of how science is done, since much of a scientist's skill involves the art of sorting through a mass of confusing data to determine what most accurately conveys reality. "In the public's mind, I could see how there's this view that science is perfect," he says. "But it's not like algebra, where if you do it right, you get the right answer."

When asked to respond, Gilbert says that the bare written record should be sufficient to make such determinations. "It's a serious problem," he says of recording data. "If it isn't in the notebook, how do you know it happened? Why should you believe your memory of it? Why should I believe your statements about it?"

But Calgene's attorneys, branding Gilbert's charge "reckless," saw things differently. That the Weintraub lab's "notebooks are not reconcilable 12 years later in every detail by a group of people who did not participate in those experiments is irrelevant," company attorney William Lee told the court. In an effort to discredit the testimony of the Nobel laureate, Lee then proceeded to adduce to particulars of the Gilbert affair. "What we ask the court to do is listen very carefully to the standards he applies to determine what scientific misconduct is when his own postdoctoral students and his own cells are being investigated," Lee urged, and the "different" standard he "applies and offers to the court in this litigation."

Earlier this year, the judge dismissed the allegations of misconduct in a single footnote, and concluded that Enzo had simply "failed to establish its claims."

WHILE GILBERT WAS testifying in other misconduct cases, David Baltimore focused on Thereza Imanishi-Kari's vindication--and by extension his own. He poured $100,000 of his own money into her defense; the majority of the rest of the estimated $1 million legal costs were handled pro bono.

Baltimore's chance for a vicarious vindication finally came in the summer of 1995 in a small, nondescript hearing room of the Departmental Appeals Board in the Washington headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. There, Imanishi-Kari received her first opportunity in nine years to cross-examine witnesses and confront the evidence head-on. Reporters mostly stayed away from the five-week hearing, but several came to watch Baltimore and Gilbert testify, each on separate days.

Baltimore's testimony broke no new ground. Everything had been said before. Gilbert took the witness stand with somewhat greater moment, declaring in a steady, confident baritone that some of Imanishi-Kari's data was "clearly fraudulent." Although he had never talked to her about the matter, he described how several notebook pages described a "killer experiment" that should have been reported in the paper had it existed at the time. Thus, he concluded, it must have been fabricated afterwards.

Gilbert had been introduced as an expert in molecular biology and immunology, though he admitted he had reviewed only "a small amount" of Imanishi-Kari's data. He also testified that his testimony "was based on my review of the forensic information developed by the Secret Service" and by the ORI's statistical analysis of allegedly telltale patterns in Imanishi-Kari's data.

Defense attorneys shied away from aggressive questioning, leaving court observers with the impression that the testimony of Baltimore's archrival was wildly successful. Imanishi-Kari's niece left the hearing and cried. But, says Joseph Onek, Imanishi-Kari's attorney, intense cross-examination was not really necessary because Gilbert's statements in reality "were all absurd."

Likewise, defense witness Terry Speed--a University of California at Berkeley statistician who served as a DNA consultant for O. J. Simpson--was appalled that Gilbert claimed expertise in the statistics of data recording.

For his part, Gilbert acknowledges he has read none of the literature on the subject, adding, "I'm not sure what literature there would be on that [topic]."

The appeals panel was similarly unimpressed. Overall, the evidence presented by the ORI, the panel wrote in an 85,000-word opinion, was "irrelevant," "internally inconsistent," and "not credible." The panel even approvingly cited Gilbert's testimony on a couple of matters--albeit as aiding the defense more than the prosecution.

The most disastrous blow was delivered not to Gilbert's testimony, but to the forensic evidence that had so convinced him of Imanishi-Kari's guilt. Indeed, the ruling hardly began to convey how thoroughly the ORI's forensic claims had disintegrated under cross-examination in the trial. Prosecution witnesses retreated from earlier claims, were trapped in logical impossibilities, made assumptions that had no supporting evidence, and gave testimony that contradicted all available documentation-- including their own notes.

As for Gilbert's argument about the missing "killer experiment," the appeals board said, "his scientific judgments might have been different if he had reviewed all of the data."

Public reaction to the ruling was swift and nearly uniform. On June 25, 1996, the New York Times lamented its earlier "rush to judgment." Most of the commentary focused on the injustice done to David Baltimore. Any lingering questions about whether he should have said this or done that were shoved aside.

With the vindication came a sense of relief in some quarters in Washington. U.S. health officials no longer considered Baltimore a pariah, a man to be avoided lest his guilty associations politically taint their work.

Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, wrote to the Times that "many of Dr. Baltimore's fellow molecular biologists who leaped to criticize him instead of to support him" should be "hanging their heads in shame about this sorry episode."

Gilbert maintained a purposeful silence, but he was not apologetic. "It doesn't particularly change my opinion about what actually happened," he says. However, his trademark scientific curiosity, hunger for original data, and willingness to challenge assumptions are notably absent from his current position. The reams of new counter-evidence presented during the trial hold no interest for him. In his interview, he appears fully satisfied with his view of the forensic evidence despite his admission that "I probably never saw it directly."

What's more, Gilbert sees no reason to revise his view of Baltimore's response to the accusations against Imanishi-Kari. "Baltimore says she's absolutely innocent," he explains. "It's a difference of opinion. That's all. There's nothing I can say about it. It's just a difference of opinion. Given my view of the matter, his response is out of line." Baltimore's greatest sin, he believes, was "trying to mobilize scientists against the Congress" during chairman Dingell's investigation. "I thought then and do now that David Baltimore damaged the future of American science at that time," Gilbert says.

Nor is Gilbert eager to confront questions about his own conduct and his own scientific shortcomings. In his eyes, he has done nothing wrong, has nothing to apologize for, nothing to cause the slightest embarrassment, nothing to require further discussion.

Gilbert also distances himself from the most obviously flawed evidence against Imanishi-Kari by claiming that "my testimony before ORI did not turn on, or concern, the work of the Secret Service," even though his testimony itself was that the "opinion is based on my review of the forensic information developed by the Secret Service." Perhaps most remarkably, he claims that he never turned against Baltimore and had little involvement in the numerous investigations of the scandal. His "only public commentary," he insists, was to complain that "faulty" investigative procedures allowed the Baltimore affair "to drag on unnecessarily."

It appears that Wally Gilbert has completely forgotten one of the many lessons he has drawn from the Baltimore affair. "It's hubris that brings down the tragic hero," Gilbert explained to a reporter in 1991. "The most charitable thing to say is that Baltimore took some arrogant view that 'I can do no wrong,' that 'whatever I write in science is true.' He couldn't admit to a mistake. If he had, this wouldn't have happened."