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From: pmd@cbscd5.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: never believe what you read in the popular press about science
Message-ID: <374@cbscd5.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 2-Aug-83 11:17:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbscd5.374
Posted: Tue Aug  2 11:17:21 1983
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Organization: Bell Labs , Columbus
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    [from Mark Weiser:]
    The book "Betrayers of the Truth" by Broad and Wade is actually a
    good example of science doing a good job policing itself.  Broad
    and Wade are both on the staff of Science magazine (or used to
    be), probably the premier english language scientific journal.
    Portions of the book appeared in articles in Science and were
    read with relish by the scientific community.

I have to disagree.  If science did a good job of policing itself the
book would never have been necessary.  Members of the scientific
community make the assumption that science is inherently self policing--
that attempts at fraud and deception would be exposed in the natural
course of events.  This is the myth that the book seeks to expose.
The authors make the point that there is an important difference between
the image of science left to us by the Logical Empiricists an how science
actually works.  Science tends to be viewed as a purely logical process
by those both within an outside the scientific community.  Chapter 7,
"The Myth of Logic" makes the point that there are other very significant
factors that influence science.  The preface to the book begins:

	"This is a book about how science really works.  It
	is an attempt to understand better a system of knowledge
	that is regarded in Western societies as the ultimate
	arbiter of truth.  We have written it in the belief that
	the real nature of science is widely misunderstood by both
	scientists and the public."

The book is not the natural outcome to the way science functions.  It is
an *active* attempt to expose fraud and deceit in science.

As for the book being accepted with relish by the scientific community,
this is not completely true.  The following is a recent article from the
Columbus Dispatch:

		JOURNALIST ENRAGES SCIENTISTS

	Nicholas Wade ignored his lunch as he listened intently
	to a well known physicist tell of his only experience
	with cheating in science.

	Wade, a journalist, occasionally interrupted the
	researcher with questions posed in that wonderfully
	British sort of way, questions that challenged the
	unspoken code of conduct among scientists.

	Wade's book "Betrayers of the Truth", had brought on
	the wrath of scores of scientists the day before at a
	symposium on fraud and dishonesty in science.  The
	symposium was one of several hundred during the American
	Association for the Advancement of Science's annual
	meeting held recently in Detroit.

	This particular symposium had rapidly changed from an
	intellectual debate to a which hunt...

	"Betrayers of the Truth", written by Wade and a colleague
	William Broad, is one of the first books to look at what
	appears to be a growing incidence of fraud and dishonesty
	in scientific research.

	The authors' credentials are impeccable.  Before joining
	*The New York Times*, both had written for the News and
	Comment section of the journal *Science*, perhaps the most
	respected operation in science journalism.  Much of the
	research that went into their book came from their reporting
	for both *Science* and the *Times*.

	The symposium was to be a debate between Wade and Norton
	Zinder, a highly respected professor of microbial genetics at
	Rockefeller University.

	Although the problem of fraud was to be the subject of the
	discourse, it was Wade and Broad's book that quickly became
	Zinder's target. And then the geneticist's aim shifted to
	the authors themselves.

	With no-so-subtile innuendos, Zinder attacked the style of
	writing, the choice of words, the title, validity of the
	reporters' research, the quality of journalism as a whole--
	everything but the basic premise that fraud could exist
	within the scientific community.

	And while Wade attempted to respond, Zinder was whispering
	to colleagues, shaking his head in dissent and dismay or
	impatiently tapping the table in distraction.

	In short, Zinder acted like a spoiled child.  His behavior
	changed the main point of the symposium.

	The other three speakers, while well behaved, chose to follow
	Zinder's lead, for the most part, and denounce the book.  One
	an elder philosopher of science, suggested that a book on this
	topic might not be objectionable had it been written by a
	scientist like himself.

	And therein lie the main objections to Wade and his book:  As
	a journalist he is looked upon as an outsider, and his critics
	maintain that the airing of science's dirty linen should
	be done by one of the field's own, if it is to be done at all.

	Ironically, it was this attitude that convinced the two
	reporters that the book must be done.

	Zinder's tirade had effectively polarized the 100 or more 
	onlookers into two camps, scientists and non-scientists, while
	the purpose of the symposium had been to offer solutions to
	an obvious problem for researchers.

	Wade's reaction the next day over lunch remained one of astonishment.
	The episode had been hardly what he expected.  He had expected
	scientists striving for the truth, not a tendency to cover up
	cases of suspected impropriety.

	But while Zinder had practically bulldozed his way through the
	symposium, Wade may get he last word.  Last year, the professor
	reviewed the book for the magazine *Science 82*.  Following
	Zinder's scathing commentary on the book, Wade said sales rose
	dramatically.  He expected another surge following the symposium.

	Zinder would succeed, Wade said, in advertising the book he so
	despised.

				by Earle Holland	June 5, 1983


Paul Dubuc