The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In a perfect world, science wouldn't be done by human beings, since despite our best efforts, we aren't truly objective about anything. When personality and emotion inevitably get mixed up with science, sparks can fly. The most notorious such conflagration in recent times was The Baltimore Case, a decade-long dispute between supposedly objective scientists that resulted in excruciating trials, sensational headlines, and damaged careers and lives. Historian Daniel Kevles tells the story of the accusations of fraud leveled by Margot O'Toole toward her colleagues, Thereza Imanishi-Kari and Nobel Prize-winner David Baltimore. Kevles first explains the controversial experimental results and the paper published outlining them. O'Toole was unable to reproduce the results of Imanishi-Kari and accused her of falsifying data, also implicating the high-profile Baltimore, coauthor of the original paper. In the following years, all participants in the investigation were subjected to dehumanizing, humiliating scrutiny--including a congressional inquiry not unlike a mini-witch-hunt--and nasty comments gleefully reported by a media eager for a big scientific scandal. Kevles comes down on the side of the self-admittedly sloppy Imanishi-Kari (who was officially exonerated in 1996) and Baltimore, painting O'Toole as a well-motivated but overenthusiastic watchdog manipulated by embarrassingly eager investigators. This book is a valuable lesson in how uneasily humanity and science share the laboratory. Even our best and brightest can be brought low by jealousy, carelessness, and deception. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

In this gripping tale of high-stakes research science colliding with headline-grabbing congressional investigations, careers and reputations are part of the wreckage. Kevles (The Physicists, etc.), a professor of humanities and scientific policy at CIT, takes readers into the esoteric realm of molecular biology to explore one of the most controversial ethical cases in modern scientific history. In 1986, David Baltimore, a 1975 Nobel laureate in medicine, coauthored a research paper on gene transfer in Cell magazine with a former MIT associate, Thereza Imanishi-Kari. When a postdoctoral fellow in Imanishi-Kari's lab could not duplicate the results of the experiment as described in the article, then made her concerns public, charges of fraud began to erupt that eventually involved scientists at Harvard, Tufts, MIT and the National Institutes of Health. According to Kevles's report, scientific gadflies at the NIH, in concert with an egoistic congressional committee chairman and moralizing scientists, opened a decade-long witch hunt that split the academic science community and nearly destroyed the professional lives of Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari. This analysis of a scandal within a scandal, which includes a brief account of the disputed experiment, breaches the high walls of science and politics for a close-up look at the dispute, with Kevles's fast-paced journalistic style rendering a recondite subject immediate and accessible for the lay reader. Photos. Agent, Ronald Goldfarb.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 509 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393041034
• ISBN-13: 978-0393041033
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,599,123 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating account of a historic scientific fraud case, February 19, 1999

By A Customer

The Baltimore case was really the Imanishi-Kari case. A young scientist in Theresa Imanishi-Kari's lab, Margot O'Toole, approached her superiors with a disagreeing opinion about one of the papers published by her superior and co-authored by Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore.Two committees found that there had been error, but not misconduct or fraud. Somehow, the case was brought to the attention of two self-appointed "fraud-busters" at the N.I.H., and a full-scale investigation was launched. The secret service was brought in to examine the lab notebooks and a draft report finding evidence of fraud was leaked to the press. A public controversy ensued, especially when it became clear that Imanishi-Kari did not have access to her own notebooks to prepare her defense. The case dragged on for a decade but ended in a triumphant exoneration on all charges. The book pleased me for two reasons : 1) It made clear the scientific controversy, which had often been overlooked in the press reports of the time, and it also defined the difference between scientific disagreement about the interpretation of data,versus fraud or error. 2) The book described the frightening escalation of the charges against Imanishi-Kari. What started out as an inability to reproduce experimental results with a temperamental reagent, ended with accusations that a third of the experimental notebooks would have been falsified !

One moral lesson can be drawn for all scientists : make sure your notebooks are organized in perfect chronological order !

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Will the politicans vanquish the scientists?, April 28, 2003

By	Preston Hunt "presto88" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (Paperback)

As an engineer by training and profession, this book really makes my blood boil. It's basically the true story of some scientists at MIT who publish a paper on immunology. A student of one of the professors challenges that some of the data in the paper was faked, and an epic of Phyrric proportions ensues.

In the 10 years that this book covers, scientific careers are ruined, researchers are vilified in the media and in the court of public opinion, and (most troubling of all to me) our elected officials engage in a witch hunt of completely innocent scientists. In particular, Senator John Dingell (Michigan) and his staff are revealed as complete devils; the author has thoroughly documented and footnoted the evidence in the case, so there is really little doubt that Mr. Dingell is as pernicious as he is portrayed in this book. Unfortunately, Mr. Dingell is still a senator to this day and no doubt is still out "to get" the scientists involved. Fortunately for science (and society), history has proven the scientists involved innocent and they have all been restored to preeminent positions in the scientific community.

Be forewarned that this is quite a tomb, weighing in at hundreds of pages of meaty scientific and political reading. At times, I contemplated giving up on it, but as the story unfolded, I wanted to see just how far this tragic comedy would unfold. The subject matter (immunology) is far removed from the layperson and I found myself at times not understanding the concepts fully. Luckily, this book is more about the sociopolitical ramifications of the science, and thus not understanding the science does not detract from the novel.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important and revealing but overlong, July 11, 2000

By	Luke Jasenosky (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (Paperback)

"The Baltimore Case" tells a fascinating, frightening story well, but in far too many pages. The previous reviewer describes the details of the case, which are familiar to most biologists but still misunderstood by many in the sciences as well as by the general public. Mr. Kevles is a descriptive master. He lays out the facts of the case in as objective a manner as I think is possible and he makes the murkiest of quarrels clear (although more figures would have been useful), but his book is very repetitive, is excessively detailed, and by the final chapters a feeling of déjà vu permeates every page. That said, he provides a very important service by convincingly showing that the Baltimore case was primarily a congressional and media fiasco perpetrated under the guise of scientific justice. Some might say that scientists are placed on a pedestal by the non-scientific public and that it is a good thing for scientists to be monitored by "impartial" parties to "keep them honest". Maybe so, but in a country whose populace still fights the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools and rejects genetically-modified foods without a basic understanding of biology, whose congressional members only support applied research that is fodder for votes, and whose media have trouble reporting the most basic scientific discoveries accurately or without sensationalizing them, the policing of scientists should be done very carefully, and "The Baltimore Case" shows why. When ignorant and incompetent individuals like Feder and Stewart are allowed to impact science for transparently self-serving reasons, and powerful politicians like Dingell are given free reign to try, convict and punish dedicated individuals with ill-concealed intellectual jealousy, the entire scientific enterprise in the United States is placed in serious jeopardy. The scientific community, like any other, will turn defensive, in-fight, and self-destruct, and the public will view scientists with greater suspicion than ever. If, after Margot O'toole lodged her initial complaint, independent scientists had been allowed to validate the work under question, which was later shown to be unimpeachable, millions of dollars would have been saved and many years of anguish would have been avoided. Instead, intellectual laziness and administrative incompetence won out and a travesty ensued. Mr. Kevles should be congratulated for making this simple, refreshing fact clear.