Stealing into Print.

• Author: Angier, Natalie

One of the few pleasures that followed the sustained gangbang of the American economy in the eighties by a club of smug Wall Street stock boys was seeing some of those white-collar rapists end up in prison. Oh, sweet justice, that even powerful and once-romanticized high financiers could be made to pay for their crimes and at last be seen as the oily swindlers they are.

Quite another reaction follows the uncloaking of a fraudulent scientist. Here, there can be no glee, no triumph, no sense of gotcha! Instead, the idea of researchers breaching our fundamental trust is frankly revolting. Scientists are supposed to be the closest thing to secular divinity, our wise divulgers of nature's mysteries. They have no other purpose but to tell the truth. So when they are caught marking the backs of mice with black ink and calling the splotches skin grafts or smoothing out a doubtful graph with a few fabricated data points, what else can one feel but profound disgust? And the fact that ever more cases of scientific fraud are coming to light only heightens the impression that nothing is sacred, everybody is corrupt, and that hell isn't large enough to hold all the sinners.

Given the emotions that surround the issue of fraud in science, Stealing into Print* is surprisingly cool, cerebral, and, on occasion, dry. It is nevertheless an important work, for it explores in scholarly detail how new discoveries are disseminated, how the exalted peer review system really works, and how difficult it is to stop fraud from permanently sullying the historical record once it has been published. Marcel LaFollette, a professor of science and technology policy at Washington University in St. Louis, is not interested in merely recounting the most harrowing fraud stories, nor does she try to address every aspect of scientific chicanery. For example, she makes no attempt to explain who is likely to cheat or why.

Instead, LaFollette takes an astringent look at one piece of the intricate business of fraud: how fraudulent papers get published and what can be done to remedy, or at least lessen, the incidence of printed fraud. By considering the process of scientific publication, she opens up wider questions of responsibility and accountability. In particular, she questions whether scientists are capable of policing theft own ranks. "What does the discovery of unethical conduct say about current systems for evaluating and disseminating research-based knowledge?" she asks. "And how may those systems be changed by efforts to detect, investigate, mitigate, and prevent wrongdoing ?" We may be unable to count on scientists to keep theft house clean, she claims, because most of them refuse to see...