ACCOUNTS OF CHEXIC’AL RESEARCH” Registered in US.Patent and Trademark Office;Copyright 1984 by the American Chemical Society
VOLUME 17
NUMBER 12
DECEMBER, 1984
EDITOR
JOSEPH F. BUNNETT
Are Scientists Arrogant? ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Joel E. Keizer John E. McMurry EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Robert Abeles Richard Bernstein R. Stephen Berry Michel Boudart Maurice M. Bursey Marshall Fixman Jenny P. Glusker Kendall N. Houk Keith U. Ingold Jay K. Kochi Maurice M. Kreevoy Theodore Kuwana Ronald N. McElhaney George W. Parshall Kenneth N. Raymond Jacob F. Schaefer Richard C. Schoonmaker Anthony M. Trozzolo BOOKS AND JOURNALS DIVISION
D. H. Michael Bowen, Director
Journals Department: Charles R. Bertsch, Head; Marianne C. Brogan, Associate Head; Mary E. Scanlan, Assistant Manager; Anne C. O’Melia, Assistant Editor Production Department: Elmer M. Pusey, Jr., Head Research and Development Department: Lorrin R. Garson, Head The American Chemical Society and ita editors assume no responsibility for the statements and opinions advanced by contributors. Views expressed in the editorials are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the official position of the American Chemical Society. Registered names and trademarks, etc., used in this publication, even without specific indication thereof, are not to be considered unprotected by law.
While I was reading “Betrayers of the Truth” by Broad and Wade (Simon and Schuster, 1982),an expos6 of fraud in science, my mood vacillated between admiration and annoyance. What I admired was the brilliance of the factual reporting; in one case history after another the writing is incisive and lucid, and the human background emerges as vividly as the scientific one. What I found annoying was the “debunking” tone of the book. The authors’ target is the “conventional ideology” of scientists. Scientific research, according to Broad and Wade, is perceived by its practitioners as an activity dominated exclusively by logic, supremely fair in considering all claims for novelty, and infallibly selfcorrecting. Broad and Wade, axes swinging, set out to prove that such an attitude is arrogant and unjustified. Of course it is, but was science ever on the pedestal from which the authors are so intent to topple it? We are all aware of science as something performed by humans, with all the fallibility that implies. The authors talk of “betrayers” of that great absolute, the “truth”. Yet research is not really the pursuit of the truth, but simply of the theory with the greatest predictive power. And few of us would affirm that this pursuit is guided by pure logic. T h e average researcher does not read Karl Popper and then go about deducing and inducing according to the cookbook. He sees the problem in front of him and tries to solve it. It does not matter, to that end, whether his reasoning is straightforward or whether there are a few lateral jumps in it. And of course science is not “infallibly” self-correcting. I t is very fallibly and selectively self-correcting, but errors are progressively eliminated, and the more important an error is the sooner it is caught. Erroneous data of marginal importance may survive in the records for decades; but try to propose a novel universal etiology of cancer and you will find your key experiments repeated without delay by critical colleagues. Thus Broad and Wade are less than fair in imputing arrogance to the scientific establishment. Most of us are humbly aware of our vulnerability to fraud and that more dangerous enemy, self-delusion. We take such precautions as we can and, having read the authors’ impressive array of case histories, we shall take better precautions. Certainly, when I read some of the stories, my alarm bells (the most precious equipment of a journal editor) started ringing. None of the contemporary cases described was in the field of chemistry. It would be nice to think that we chemists are more honest, more self-critical, less subject to pressure. But the fact is that in our domain fakery is very difficult, and might require more ingenuity than honest research. The average chemist has to interact with his microanalyst and the guardians of various complex instruments; in the end, there would be an uncomforable number of people to bribe or to deceive. But if we chemists seem to live in a safe neighborhood, that does not mean we need not install burglar alarms. Robert Schoenfeld Australian Journal of Chemistry
