When Science Goes Wrong (Paperback)

by Simon LeVay (Author) "Morgues are spooky places at the best of times..." (more)
Key Phrases: crime lab, speech pathology, lower powerhouse, Met Office, Los Angeles, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Experimental brain surgery goes horribly awry; a dam fails catastrophically; a geologist leads an ill-equipped party to its doom in the mouth of an active volcano: these are the amazing and sometimes horrific stories of technical errors and scientific mistakes that LeVay (The Sexual Brain) relates. Some, like the case of the British meteorologist who failed to predict a hurricane that killed 18 people, seem due to arrogance. Others—the loss of a costly spacecraft, a criminal conviction based on inaccurate DNA analysis, multiple deaths after an accidental release of anthrax—are the result of ordinary human error. Some incidents may well have been deliberate, such as a nuclear reactor error that was possibly the result of a love triangle gone bad, or the data falsified by a physicist seeking fame as the discoverer of a new element. LeVay surveys a range of fields, offering several reasons why things go wrong and noting that for every brilliant scientific success, there are a dozen failures. Readers curious about particularly notorious cases will find LeVay's book both entertaining and thought provoking. (Mar. 25)
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From Booklist
LeVay, a neuroscientist and author of popular-science books, relates a dozen stories involving science going, in his words, “spectacularly, even horribly, wrong.” A man who receives a cutting-edge treatment for Parkinson’s later dies, possibly as a result of the treatment; a group of researchers enters an active volcano, under the mistaken belief that it’s dormant; a NASA exploratory mission fails; forensic evidence fingers the wrong man; and so on. The stories (cautionary tales, really) are intriguing and well told, but most readers will find themselves resisting the exposé angle; surely, in every scientific discipline, no matter how rigorously practiced, it’s possible to find cases where the system breaks down. It’s a bit ironic, too, that LeVay, who has seen his share of controversy over charges that some of his research cannot be repeated or verified, has written a book about the consequences of human error. Still, there is much of interest here, though readers may want to do some homework in order to form an informed opinion on some of the author's claims. --David Pitt

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Plume (March 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452289327
• ISBN-13: 978-0452289321
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #513,287 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding read, April 15, 2008

By	Federico Girosi (Santa Monica, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A most enjoyable book. I read other books of this author and have always been
fascinated by his literary style, but in this book the author outdid
himself. Because the stories told in this book lend themselves to mix personal
and scientific aspects, they read like a thriller, but a highly informative
one. The chapters span a wide range of topics relating to science, engineering
and technology, so that there is something for everybody. However, despite the
variety of subjects covered, there is a clear unifying theme: scientists, and
people with highly technical occupations, are as human as everybody else. They
make mistakes, are moved by noble and less noble motives, and have careers to
worry about. In each chapter the author effortlessy switches between the
description of technical issues and the emotions and conflicts of the people
around that issue. It is this mixture that makes the book so enjoyable and
accessible to everyone. Technical details are never presented as dry facts, but
always firmly attached to some key event in the story, and personal details are
always offered to provide a natural context for the more technical aspects. One
aspect of this book which I really appreciated is that it got me interested in
things which, at first look, seemed not terribly exciting, like Mary Tudor's
study of stuttering in orphans, which took place in pre World War 2 Iowa. As the
story in question and the characters became more developed I could see the
orphanage and Mary Tudor in my mind, and started asking myself questions on
ethics and motives which trascended the specific topic. I highly recommend this
book to anyone with an inquisitive mind. The author has an impeccable reputation
for his thourough research, and he clearly conducted an impressive series of
interviews in developing the material for this book. Combined with his mastery
of the English language this led to an excellent product, which makes for a very
satisfying read.

21 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing., April 14, 2008

By	David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book was a major disappointment. I'd seen an interview with the author on "The Daily Show" and wasn't that impressed, but bought the book anyway because of the promise inherent in its subject matter. Sadly, that promise remains largely unfulfilled in this pedestrian, and often irritating, effort by LeVay. The book is arranged in twelve chapters, each considering a specific instance of what LeVay deems to be 'scientific failure'. These specific aspects of the book bothered me:

1. Several vignettes (e.g. the 1928 St Francis dam break, a 1961 nuclear reactor explosion at the Idaho National Laboratory) clearly deal with *engineering*, rather than scientific, failures. But throughout the book, LeVay makes little distinction among science, engineering, and technology, which makes the title misleading.

2. "I had hoped to find out more about this from Tudor herself but ... she had died a few weeks earlier"
"Dyer ... seems to have disappeared from public view"
"Williams ... didn't respond to my requests for an interview"

The book is studded with this kind of admission. Failure to represent all points of view adequately may be inevitable in an exercise like this, and LeVay does acknowledge this difficulty. Nonetheless, the reader is left with some niggling doubts about his credibility. In a story about an experiment conducted almost 70 years ago, to miss obtaining testimony of the main protagonist by three weeks seems unfortunate, to say the least. And in almost every chapter, it seems, LeVay is forced to admit that testimony of at least one key person was unavailable.

3. One chapter, about the 'failure' of the BBC Met Office to predict a severe storm in 1988 has no discernibly useful comment to make about science, except maybe that computer weather prediction models are often inadequate. But it does give the unsettling impression that LeVay constructed a 'story' where none existed, then collected a bunch of selective quotes to buttress his preformed prejudices. Several times I found myself wondering about LeVay's status as a neutral observer, not the feeling one wants to come away with after reading a book like this. Similarly, the reason for including a vignette about a patient with late-stage Parkinson's disease, who flies to China for fetal-implant surgery forbidden in the U.S., with predictably disastrous consequences, is murky. What point is LeVay trying to make - that submitting to experimental surgery under poor supervision in an inadequately equipped facility is a bad idea? Well, duh! This type of pandering to lurid curiosity seemed better suited to World Weekly News than to a serious book.

4. Maddeningly, in several vignettes, one feels that an opportunity was missed to write a far more interesting story. A story about confusion of units leading to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter and its aftermath suggests at least two more interesting possibilities: an analysis of the culture at NASA which made such errors possible, even likely, or a discussion of the high prevalence (with often deadly consequences) of serious dosing errors in U.S. hospitals. Similarly, LeVay's account of the death of Jesse Gelsinger in the now-infamous gene therapy trial at U. Penn was an even-handed presentation of the facts of the case, but left me wishing for a more illuminating discussion of its implications. The reader is left with the impression that the case dealt a death blow to the future of gene therapy (which seems unlikely). Several interesting questions raised by the case are left largely unexamined, e.g.:

* how scientific ambition can corrupt the scientific process
* the potentially destructive hegemony of the status quo in the biomedical and scientific establishment
* direct funding of clinical research by pharmaceutical companies and associated issues
* the appropriate balance of risk and caution in the regulation of biomedical research

Pointing out cases where things have gone wrong is necessary and useful. But ultimately, unless it fuels a discussion of how things can be improved in the future, it starts to feel like a slightly smug exercise in playing Gotcha! LeVay's idiosyncratic selection of case studies, his conflation of science, technology, and engineering, as well as a repeated failure to explore the more interesting questions raised by his examples combine to make this book a real disappointment.

3.0 out of 5 stars A BookLove Review, February 27, 2009

By	Michele Lee "~Michele Lee~" (Louisville, KY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Science Goes Wrong (Paperback)

Review by Jason Lush

Really should have been called "When Humans with College Educations To Really Stupid Things", but I guess that wouldn't be sensational enough.

When Science Goes Wrong is informative and engaging, but I believe it may have been rushed to press to capitalize on some event. The book covers twelve events in recent history in which seemingly smart people committed decidedly careless or outright stupid deeds, always at the cost of others.

Each of the twelve stories are factual and informative, but every one of them is jam-packed with worthless fluff and personal anecdotes that distract from the point. My advice is read the first three and last three pages of each chapter and you'll get all the relevant information you need.