Morton Meyers - Prize fight: the race and the rivalry to be the first in science

PRIZE
FIGHT

PRIZE
FIGHT

THE RACE AND THE RIVALRY
TO BE THE FIRST IN SCIENCE

Morton A. Meyers, MD

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Dedicated to
Bea, Amy, Richard, Karen, Sarah, and Sam

Yes, Virginia, scientists do love recognition, but only since Pythagoras.

Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate

CONTENTS

PRIZE FIGHT

Copyright Morton A. Meyers, 2012.

All rights reserved.

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First published in 2012

by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Morton A.

Prize fight : the race and the rivalry to be the first in science / Morton A. Meyers.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780230338906 (hardback)

1. ResearchMoral and ethical aspects. 2. ScientistsPsychology. 3. ScientistsProfessional relationships. I. Title.

Q180.55.M67M49 2012

174.95dc23 2011047900

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: June 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

INTRODUCTION

LOOK AWAY FROM
THE BALL

In basketball this rule highlights how the game is really played. The point guard of a college basketball team once asked his coach how he could improve his playing. The coach asked him what he did in practice. Pass, dribble, and shoot, the player replied, indicating that he kept the ball in his control. The coach nodded his head and told him to have someone clock how much time he actually spent handling the ball in a regulation game. The player was surprised to find that he had his hands on the basketball less than three total minutes out of a forty-minute game.

What do you learn from that? asked his coach.

Beats me, said the player.

You learn, said the coach, that most of the game is played away from the ball.

A good game of basketball is not just exciting slam-dunks and three-point shots; it also involves competitive spirit, the race against the clock, fouls, time-outs, and, of course, overall strategy. The real challenge is not to focus on where the ball is at any particular moment but rather where it is likely to be in the next play. Sportswriters tend to burnish the image of a particular player without due acknowledgment of the contributions of the teammates or the aggressive actions of the opposing players.

So it is in science. The Lasker Awards, presented by the American Lasker Foundation, are announced at the end of September and often presage future recognition by the Nobel committee, so they have become popularly known as Americas Nobels. The Nobel Prizes, the jewel in the crown of scientific achievements, are announced in October each year. But it is not just the announcement and recognition of a scientific discovery that is meaningful. We must also look away from the ball. We must seek to understand the continuing process, the enduring fundamentals, the richly textured human dramas swirling around pivotal discoveries that are as true and relevant today as they were yesterday. To focus solely or predominantly on the science distracts from the underlying human factors. The lens through which these human interactions can be meaningfully viewed is the domain of the sociology of science.

This book explores a fundamental question underlying scientific research. Whose work earns the hallmark of priority for an original meaningful discovery of a scientific truth? How is credit determined, allocated, and contested? The literature contains very little on the subject, despite the fact that it is a pervasive source of discomfort, and not uncommonly agony, among researchers. This is reflected in the acceptance speech by one of the winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, H. David Politzer, noteworthy for his unusually candid portrayal of the human interactions involved. The address is cogently titled The Dilemma of Attribution. Politzer concludes: More of the public should contemplate these matters [regarding the competitive drive for recognition] if they wish to understand not just the ideas of science but also how they have developed.

Even in disparate academic circles, the issue of allocation and misallocation of credit has generally received scant notice. A controversy over proper attribution within one discipline hardly causes a ripple within another. Should it receive attention in the media, it is usually shrugged off as an aberration, a misadventure under a set of unique circumstances. But in 2003 the unprecedented public outburst by Raymond Damadian over his exclusion from being awarded the Noble Prize for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed the all-too-human passions behind the headlines. MRI was not an abstract advance of remotely theoretical potential but one of practical benefits familiar to many. Damadians outburst was an appeal to the general publicMRI now being a household termas well as the scientific community and the Nobel committee.

And then in October 2010, the long-simmering dispute over the priority of identification of the AIDS viruswhich had required the personal intervention of the president of the United States and the prime minister of Francewas officially resolved with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in medicine to Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The controversy fomented aggressive behavior between Montagnier and his rival, Robert Gallo, a respected researcher at the National Cancer Institute, and attracted the attention of scientists, physicians, AIDS activists, government officials, and the general public.

TODAYS PROBLEM

Recently, a number of instances of fraudulent research reports, typically from premier institutions in the United States, received wide publication in the popular press. Indeed, in just the last few years, there has been an explosion of widely reported cases of scientific misconduct in the press.

In August 2010, as reported on the front page of the New York Times, Harvard University found Marc Hauser, a prominent researcher in animal cognition and morality, solely responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct. Dr. Hausers difficulties began when a research assistant accused him of subjectively influencing assessments of primate behavior. Based on this, in 2007 university officials went into his lab one afternoon while he was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records. Some of his data were found to be missing, and critics have since challenged Hausers published results as incorrect or unconvincing.

In 2008, Linda R. Buck, a 2004 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine for deciphering the workings of the sense of smell, retracted a 2001 paper that had been published in Nature. In September 2010, she retracted two more published papers, one from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, one from Science in 2006. The retractions did not concern the work for which Dr. Buck won the Nobel Prize. However, the first author of all three retracted papers was a postdoctoral researcher who had conducted the experiments in Dr. Bucks lab. Dr. Buck was unable to reproduce the key findings in these papers; her figures were inconsistent with the original data.