Physician and researcher William Summerlin believed he had found a procedure that would prevent the rejection of skin grafts. In a 1974 experiment at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, he grafted bits of skin from dark-colored mice to the backs of white mice. Successful grafts would be easy to detect as dark spots on the white mice. Alas, the experiment failed, and in order to avoid this unwelcome result, Dr. Summerlin took a felt-tipped pen and drew dark spots on the backs of the white mice to make it look like the grafts had succeeded. A lab assistant detected this fraud and Dr. Summerlin, amid much negative publicity for all concerned, had to leave the Institute.
In their classic book, Betrayers of the Truth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), William Broad and Nicholas Wade tell this and other stories of scientists who betrayed their profession by outrageous acts of plagiarism, data fabrication, and falsification. It is not pleasant reading, but it dearly reveals how easily certain kinds of scientific fraud can be perpetrated.
Recently, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments issued its report detailing substantial violations of research ethics by scientists studying the effects of radiation. Many patients were subjected to dangerous radiation studies without their knowledge or consent. The exploitation of human beings in clinical experiments is only the most recent instance of the dark side of science.* A few years ago Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore had to resign as president of Rockefeller Uni-*See my "Ethical Issues in Clinical Trials," Issues in Eth-