This
bibliography
on fraud in science is the result of 25
years of work in this field. It’s been a labor of love and
hasn’t been supported by any agency of
government or private foundation. That way, I’m not beholding
to anyone. It’s my work and I’m solely responsible for
it.
The work began as an
effort to apply deviance theory to an area to which it did not
apparently belong. And in 1977 science represented to my mind
an area to which deviance theory did not apply. Science, I naively
believed that science belonged to that special order of being
that was special if not sacred. It was, as I had been taught by
Robert K. Merton, an exceptional institution. Then, too, even
Karl Mannheim exempted it from the sociology of knowledge as he
saw scientific knowledge as Truth and, again, as something special.
So, if there were an area to which deviance theory did not apply,
surely, this was it.
As soon as I started
examining science, I found examples of outrageous deviance in
the conduct of science. I do not mean that there were scientists
who committed crimes like murder and theft; quite the contrary,
I mean that there are scientists who are guilty of "misconduct"
in the process of doing science itself. In fact, science is fairly
frequently done as "fast practice." Scientists, like
the rest of us, try to cut corners, get their papers published,
have their ideas for research funded, compete with co-professionals,
and vie for glory in a manner that suggests science is a manly
activity. It is not a career for nice guys, cowards, or nerds.
On the contrary, science is aggressive and not at all for the
faint of heart. And, marvelous to say, the pathways to truth are
marvelous to behold and their existence usually kept from the
common man.
This finding was unexpected
and intriguing. The more I looked at the history of science, the
more deviant science I found. Every stone turned up a new worm
and I was turning a lot of stones. Some of the best known scientists
in history were guilty of various things and I found learning
about them fascinating. I quickly became a scandalmonger and a
gossip: I could tell tales, as it were, out of school. I could
expose the dirty laundry. I was the ultimate yenta blasting away
at the best and the brightest. It was fun!
And the deviance of
science does not, as one might expect, devolve on the mediocrities
of science. It is the very biggest names who have pulled off some
of the biggest scams. Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, even Kepler,
and Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, and so on. Those whose names I had
memorized as a child as the heroes of Western civilization all
had feet of clay. And I had to find this out myself. Of course,
as a social scientist I should have known that these were men.
As such, they behaved as do the rest of us. The greatness they
supposedly display is ascribed and only partially achieved. These
men are held up for use as scientific geniuses but the term genius
explains nothing about their behavior. The search for genius is
misguided: there's no such thing. There are only men and women
trying to get their wares accepted by the rest of us. Some of
them succeed (for the damndest reasons) and that tells us something
about us but very little about them. Why some products are hailed
as the work of genius and a breakthrough is the work not of science
but the work of those who hail science as the great achievement
it is supposed to be.
This is to say that
science is not judged by its accomplishments but by its own press
agents, not by its products but by its promoters. And the taxpayers
believe and pay. Some may recognize the basis of this approach
to science: labelling theory. And the basic premise of labelling
theory is this: to understand some phenomenon, it is necessary
to understand the process of identifying that phenomenon. Thus,
in his important study of suicide, Jack D. Douglas argued very
persuasively that to understand suicide, one had to understand
coroners! Suicide was a label applied by the living to the dead,
and little more. The psychology of the successful suicide is irrelevant
for the label applied to him. And the process of labelling is
a social construction: what is "on the mind" of the
coroner when he or she labels the decedent? The coroner is subject
to many social pressures which are determining of his or her behavior,
and only one constraint on the behavior is the idea that the decedent
may or may not have committed suicide.
To understand a criminal, it is necessary
to understand the system of criminal justice. To understand mental
illness, it is necessary to understand psychiatry (in all its
variants). To understand any phenomenon, it is necessary to avert
one's eyes from the apparent subject and to look, indirectly,
at the social dynamics of knowledge construction. Of course, this
approach is not one taken by naive realists, but it is the one
taken here.
As soon as I started
examining science, I found examples of outrageous deviance in
the conduct of science. I do not mean that there were scientists
who committed crimes like murder and theft; quite the contrary,
I mean that there are scientists who are guilty of "misconduct"
in the process of doing science itself. In fact, science is fairly
frequently done as "fast practice." Scientists, like
the rest of us, try to cut corners, get their papers published,
have their ideas for research funded, compete with co-professionals,
and vie for glory in a manner that suggests science is a manly
activity. It is not a career for nice guys, cowards, or nerds.
On the contrary, science is aggressive and not at all for the
faint of heart. And, marvelous to say, the pathways to truth are
marvelous to behold and their existence usually kept from the
common man.
So, examining the institution
of science in Western Civilization, say in the era of modern science,
from the publication of the first edition of the Principia (1689)
requires that we come to see the historians, and other science
watchers, who have created our perception, our awareness of science.
It is not enough to talk about, say, Newton and Darwin: one must
talk about the birth of mechanics and materialistic evolutionary
theory as process at work in the context of their day. Newton
or Darwin is not a man but a construction by "science watchers"
who, for their own reasons, wanted social change. Newton was in
fact the personification of the Glorious Revolution in English
history and the Enlightenment in intellectual history. Darwin
became the "scientific" basis for the imperialism and
militarism of the 19th century. And today we have fakes of various
sorts carrying on what is an old tradition: Robert A. Millikan
(the first native-born American to win the Nobel prize in physics),
right on to David Baltimore's abuse of the post-doctoral Margot
O'Toole. The social context of science is a wonderful context
for examining science's history. The deviousness of humankind,
especially in science, is just too funny for words.
