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This bibliography on fraud in science is the result of 3 decades and more of spare-time work
in this field. Its 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. Its 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.
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