Word: spectors
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...Phil Spector's Christmas Album
Cheating, of course, is common to many professions these days, even in past bastions of integrity like science, which has traditionally placed the search for truth above all other goals. But the Spector scandal has shaken this edifice in special ways. Besides wrecking the career of a gifted young researcher, it severely damaged a major man of science, Specter's sponsor, Cornell Biochemist Efraim Racker, who was ultimately responsible for supervising the results. More important, beyond whatever personal trauma may be involved, the case has put the entire research community on trial in the public mind. Once again there...
Fellow researchers were awed by young Mark Spector's golden touch in the lab: he could often complete in a matter of days complex experiments that took others weeks and even months to do. Shortly after he entered Cornell University in 1980 as a graduate student in biochemistry, Spector was working with some of the most eminent men in his field. Most remarkable of all, at age 24, Spector seemed on the verge of proving a bold new theory explaining how tumor-causing viruses could turn a cell cancerous. He looked like a good bet for a Nobel Prize...
...career was in ruins. Findings that were touted only last summer as a fundamental breakthrough in the understanding of carcinogenesis have been branded fraudulent. Colleagues discovered that his results included protein gels-isolated bits of cellular matter-that were cunningly doctored to look like something they were not. While Spector denied any wrongdoing, he was expelled from the Cornell lab, withdrew his Ph.D. thesis, even though it had already been approved, and quit the university. Important aspects of his work may yet turn out to be true, but few believe he will ever be able to return to scientific research...
...rival may be only too willing to blow the whistle. Scientists also like to point out that science was long protected from fraud by a built-in safety mechanism: to be generally accepted, experiments must be repeatable by others. Indeed it was just such a failure that led to Spector's downfall. But in contemporary practice, the safeguard often does not work. So much is being done in every field that unless an experiment is really important, years may pass before anyone tries to repeat it. Especially at a time when new ideas are at a premium, there...