They call him the “terrorist of the lab,” but this self-appointed scourge of scientific fraud has reason to suspect that as much as 25 percentof all research papers maybeintentionally fudged hen | was young, and colleague Ned Feder | always assumed have decided to redressthis scientists told wrong. For their efforts, the truth,” says fraud investi- they have earned the enmity gator Walter Stewart. Today of a numberof luminaries, he knowsotherwise. Some among them Nobellaureate scientists, maybe many, David Baltimore, who has he says, fiddle with their data. warned angrily that their ac- A few scientists lie. And tivities could’serve to “cripple lots publish erroneous results. American science.” Other “But when something is colleagues just don’t seem to published that turns out to be appreciate their dedication. wrong,” Stewart points out Reviewing someof Stewart's with indignation, “you almost early research, J. Edward never see a retraction.” Rall, a deputy director at the In courtrooms and before National Institutes of Health congressional panels, Stewart (NIH), painted Stewart as a PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE MITCHELL 65 brilliant laboratory investigator who has the other way instead of investig unfortunately chosen to waste his time earnest. A three-man panel cho “grubbing around in the sewers of sci- the NIH to look into the matter included: entific stupidity, sloth, and fraud.” former student of Baltimore's who had - Officially, Stewart, is a researcher at the collaborated extensively with him NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, where his prominent scientist who had rec current project is the genetic control of coauthored a textbook with him. The*re- the shape of nerve cells in snails. Much searcher who had stepped forward after of his researchtime in récent years, how- discovering the 17 pages of lab notes, ever, has on his owninitiative been spent meanwhile, found herself publicly de- aeweren't apt to cast un- investigating cases of questioned sci- nounced and outof a job. popular votes if it made them feel con- ence. Stewart and Feder receive more Whatever problems there were, Balti- lesignedandbuilt a port- than 100 allegations a year that pub- more respondedangrily, arose frori:mi- ‘able'voting chine ‘for:classelections, lished work is wrong or crooked—afig- norerrors, not fraud. Stewart and Feder using parts he scavenged at sécond- ure at least four times higher than the asked to see the rest of the lab records hand shops. His creation,finished with number of complaints lodged with the just to check. Baltimore refused. “Exter- NIH’s official misconductoffice. nal reviews of data are relevant,”:hé: Last summerStewartjoined magician/ gued, “only when probable cail investigator James Randi and Nature ed- fraud have been established:' itor John Maddoxto investigate a mys- more’s stand was seconded by terious experiment that had just been in the scientific community. Oth published in Nature and that was making . preted the messageas,“Let the. headlines around the world. A team of network take careofit.” Baltimore finally This honoris given to scholars not en- Parisian scientists led by Jacques Ben- agreed to release his team’s records.to rolled in doctoral programs, letting them veniste of the French Medical Research pursue individual studies. He came to the Council had supposedly discovered and NIH in the late Sixties. Though Stewart documented a biological effect caused has worked as a scientist for some 20 byinfinitesimal amounts of a human an- years, he never earned a Ph.D. tibody known as anti-IgE, or anti-immu- he shares a windowlessbase- noglobulin E. The experiment suggested @/ noticedthe nBethesda’‘with’Feder and a a scientific underpinning for homeo- journal paper included ‘ge'collection of snails. Stewart is con- pathy, a pseudoscience that purports to sidered ‘a talented researcher who has _ aseventeen- cure patients with vanishingly small doses made.a numberofuseful discoveries, in- of medication. The scientific world was year-old with the disease... cluding the synthesis of Lucifer yellow, a baffled by Benveniste’s claims. A num- He was listed dyé.used to study nervecells. In recent ber of experis considered the effect Ben- years, however, the NIH hierarchyis said veniste claimed to have observed—bio- as having four children, to be dissatisfied with his lack of scien- logical effects due to solutions diluted including an ~ tific productivity, an unhappiness re- past the point where they could contain eight-year-old daughter? flected in cutbacks in his lab space and molecules of anti-lgE—to be impossible. equipment. Lately Stewart has been After seeing the experiment repeated. spendingless time in the NIH basement seven times under various conditions and and more on Capitol Hill. The NIH has after examining the laboratory records for acquiescedin loaning him to a congres- the last five years, Maddox, Randi and sional subcommittee headed by Michi- Stewart decided the “impossible reac- an investigating committee provided, gan’s John Dingell. The subcommittee is tion” was a case of self-delusion. Ben- among other things, that Stewart and looking into scientific misconduct. veniste, however, dismissed the three- Feder promise in advance to drop public Putting in 80-hour weeks on fraud some as witch-hunters. They had discussion of the matter if the committee sleuthing hasleft him less time than he’d unleashed, he said, a “tornado of ... found no fraud. The pair refused, saying like for his family and no time at all for suspicion, fear, psychological and intel- they were engaging in the scientific tra- such choresas lawn mowingat their sub- lectual pressure” and had “terrorized”his dition of free and open debate. They have, urban home. His resulting experimentin staff. “Never let these people into your . however, stopped talking about the case - “meadow gardening” has outraged his lab!” Benveniste warned the world. publicly while it is being investigated. neighbors. The county government cited Back home Stewart and Feder’s chal- Stewart argues that their involvement the incipient jungle under the so-called lenge to a paper published by high-pro- in caseslike this is science, not med- weedlaw, which creates the legal pre- file. immunologist David Baltimore and co- dling. Science is a search for new and sumption that plants over 12 inches are workers attracted’ congressional atten- unknowntruths, and as such is bound to dangerous to the public. Stewart, char- tion. Stewart and Federclaimed that the involve errors. But, he says, scientists acteristically, has fought the neighbors published paper was contradicted by the have a responsibility to correct pub-. and county to a standoff. group's own experimental data. They lished error. Stewart insists that he wel- Interviewer Doug Stewart(no relation) based their assertions on 17 pages of comescriticism but prefers it be focused found scientist Stewart to be a man ob- data discovered by Margot O'Toole, a on correcting factual mistakes or meth- sessed. Impulsive, excitable, precise, and postdoctoral feliow in the lab of one of the odological errors he has made, rather utterly serious, he would be the quintes- coauthors. O’Toole thought the data than attacking his right to carry on inves- sential eccentric were it not for the per- showed the paper contained errors that tigations in the first place. His critics sel- fectly reasonable explanations he offers ought to be correctedin the scientific lit- dom feel thus constrained. Daniel Kosh- for everything he does. erature. Baltimore and his coauthors dis- land, editor of Science, has written that _ agreed, and they were backed up by two Stewart's and Feder's activities smack of Omni: The editor of Science magazine university committees at Tufts and MIT McCarthyism. Arnold Relman, editor. suggestedthat “99.9999 percent” of that investigated the matter. The New England Journal of Medicine iblished‘scientific reports are truthful. Stewart and Federalso argued that the warns more ominouslythat“truth squads Do you‘agree? scientific establishment wastrying to look and special investigative teams are not ‘Stewart: ‘Daniel Koshland’s estimateis al- 66 OMNI CONTINUED ON PAGE.87 ence—unlike, say, accounting—we have as muchof a dissolved subsiance as you UTI to expect that people will make lots and started with. After you've madefifteen di- lutions in a row, the chancesare there's CONTINUED FROM PAGE 66 lots of errors. And that means we have a just a single molecule of the substance responsibility to deal with those errors, most certainly wrong. Most working sci- whether it's our own, a colleague's, or still in solution. Make five more dilutions, entists assume that misconduct is no anybodyelse's. It may be okay to make and there is only one chancein one hun- problem atall. It's alarming howlittle we errors, Dut unless they're minor, it’s not dred thousandthat you've got any mole- actually know aboutthe level of scientific okay notto fix them. cules of the anti-IgE left at ail. That's only misconduct. Dr. Jerome Jacobstein, for- Omni: You recently returned from an in- twenty dilutions, but Benveniste re- merly at Cornell University Medica! Col- vestigation of the so-called “impossible ported that after twenty-five dilutions, he lege, testified before Congress that he experiment” of Dr. Jacques Benveniste. was still observing a strong effect! His believed twenty-five percent of scientific Whatreaction did he say he saw? researchers did experiments with one papers may be based in part on data Stewart: The researchers were measur- hundred twenty dilutions in a row, and that’s been intentionally fudged. That’s a ing the way white blood cells react to an theystill claimed to get an effect. shocking figure, butit’s conceivable. antibody from the human immune sys- Omni: Did they try the experiment using Omni: What's the difference between tem. The antibody, anti-lgE [anti-immu- just water? misconduct and fraud? noglobulin E], causes white blood cells Stewart: Yes.