W W Norton, £21, pp 448

ISBN 0393041034

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Rating:

The story would make a marvellous soap opera. The research, into immunological genetics and published in Cell, is complex, made worse by the inadequate English of Teresa Imanishi-Kari, the Brazilian-Japanese research worker. Accused of fraud, she is defended by her charismatic but hubristic boss, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore, who takes on a congressional committee. The whistleblower, Margot O’Toole, a young Irish radical, loses her job, house, and career—but receives international honours and publicity for her courage. After 10 years and seven inquiries, reviews, and the final, successful, appeal, the US immunological establishment has disagreed about guilt or innocence, and even the secret service has examined the research records.

The subtitle—“A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character”—of David Kevles’ beautifully written book, then, is apt. Importantly, he corrects any wrong emphasis in the record (the accusations received frequent publicity in the lay and scientific press, the outcome much less prominence). For Imanishi-Kari was guilty only of sloppy science. O’Toole’s tribulations were invented by the media: her post had finished and could not be extended, she had chosen to move to her mother’s house, and she had not applied for a further research job. Only later, moreover, did she allege fraud: her original concern had been the study’s accuracy, but this had altered after she had talked to a colleague and to members of the congressional committee staff. Finally, but hardly surprisingly, the secret service made a cock-up of validating the inks used in the computer printers.

The background to “the Baltimore case” (so called to reflect his protagonism, though he was never accused of fraud) was a decade of misconduct cases inadequately managed by the prestigious institutions and scientists involved. Given its vast investment in research, congress had ordered an investigation, chaired by the Democrat, John Dingell. Dingell was sincerely concerned about the issue, but his style was hectoring and he was aided by zealots and bullies, who extensively subpoenaed documents but then withheld them from the accused, and made frequent leaks to the media. At the congressional hearings, though, Dingell was to be worsted by Baltimore, who had already conducted a publicity campaign and insisted on having the last word. Many scientists felt that he had gone too far: congress had a legitimate role in such inquiries, and science funding might suffer. Such concern surfaced when Baltimore subsequently became president of Rockefeller University, and, though he was popular with the younger faculty and had succeeded in raising new research funds and cutting costs, he was eventually forced to resign.

The eventual finding in Imanishi-Kari’s favour had a positive outcome. Baltimore himself was restored to the great and the good of US science and is now a colleague of Kevles at Cal-Tech. Imanishi-Kari was reinstated in her Boston post, while the National Institutes of Health was forced to reorganise its mechanisms for dealing with alleged fraud. Crucially, its Office of Scientific Integrity, formed in 1989 during the inquiry and run on an academic basis by dialogue with the accused, was transmuted in 1992 into the Office of Research Integrity, grounded in due process—furnishing the accused with details of the charges, allowing access to documents and cross examination of witnesses, appointing a neutral panel of inquiry, and prohibiting leaks.

Whatever the hurts, the Baltimore case resulted in a serious approach to tackling a probably small but important feature of any society. Ancien regimes, such as Britain, with their continual emphasis on doing little but brushing such distasteful episodes under the carpet, could learn a lot from this book and the example set across the Atlantic.