Caltech's David Goodstein Investigates Sham Science in "On Fact and Fraud"

In 1988, physicist David Goodstein was appointed Caltech's vice provost, and one of his first assignments was to draft a formal policy for the Institute on scientific misconduct. Up until then, Goodstein says, he hadn't thought much about the subject. Few scientists did, because it wasn't considered a problem. But after months studying the topic, he says, he discovered that fraud in scientific research, while rare, was an important matter to investigate. "By default, I became the expert," he says.

Not long after drafting the Institute's scientific misconduct policy, Goodstein, who is today the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Emeritus, codesigned Caltech's first course on scientific ethics, called "Ethics in Research," with his Institute colleague Jim Woodward. He and Woodward, the Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, have taught it off and on for nearly two decades. They're teaching it again this term, and this year they've introduced a new textbook: On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science by David Goodstein.

Published in March by Princeton University Press, the book grows out of Goodstein's considerable experience with science fraud as both vice provost and professor. As a Caltech administrator, Goodstein says, he was called upon to investigate several alleged cases of scientific misconduct that arose at the Institute and to deal with shifting, not necessarily consistent, and not always helpful federal guidelines on the issue. As a teacher, he was unhappy about the lack of material on actual science fraud cases that he felt could serve as a really good resource for students.

"I realized," he says, "that students, scientists, and the general public could use a primer on the subject that dealt with genuine case histories. So I decided to write one myself."

While science fraud may not generate as much buzz as the topic of Goodstein's last book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, which became a bestseller, he hopes this new book will offer a revealing look at how scientific research actually works and spark new discussion about what constitutes misconduct in science. The book, which deals with both Caltech and non-Caltech cases, is intended to appeal to both scientists and laypeople.

An early review in the British magazine New Scientist praised the book for its entertaining and accessible approach, saying, "Goodstein's candour and humour make this book a delight to read, and he's very good at explaining physics, too."

Overall, said Goodstein in a recent interview, the collaborative and competitive nature of science makes it extremely difficult to commit fraud and get away with it. But when it does occur, scientific fraud or misconduct—he uses the two terms interchangeably—usually involves falsifying data, cutting corners, or misrepresenting research results in other ways. While the vast majority of scientists do not commit fraud, Goodstein explains that there are three primary motivations for those who stray.

The first is career pressure. Scientists face keen competition to make discoveries, which occasionally spurs a few to cheat. The second reason, which is related to the first, involves overly confident or ambitious investigators "who know or think they know what the answer to the problem they're considering would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly." Since they are certain that they know the result, they simply leapfrog past the steps that require them to produce it.

These scientists are not necessarily lazy, Goodstein says. "They may just feel intensely driven to complete research quickly."

The third reason is that scientists who work in a field "where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible" may be tempted to cheat because the nature of what they're doing makes it easier to misrepresent data or, at the extreme, simply fabricate it out of whole cloth. One of Goodstein's chapters deals with the astonishing case of an apparent physics wunderkind who, at the height of his career, churned out on average a paper a week in which he reported stunning and widely heralded breakthroughs in organic semiconductor technology. Then, as Goodstein notes wryly, "The wheels started to come off." Not only were there no breakthroughs, there had in fact been no experiments. There was only a deeply embarrassed and shaken physics community whose debate over how this could possibly have happened is, as Goodstein notes, "still going on."

In his book, Goodstein ranges widely throughout the history and culture of modern science, often using the cases he discusses as a window onto the larger scientific enterprise. The Caltech cases that he covers include two that occurred in biology under his watch as vice provost. He also takes a close look at the long-standing controversy over whether the Institute's first president, Robert A. Millikan, committed science fraud in a series of landmark "oil drop" experiments that he carried out at the University of Chicago to determine the value of charge on the electron.

Over the years, Millikan has been accused of cooking his data by discarding results that did not fit his theory—a damning accusation if true, since this was the work that won him the Nobel Prize. After a lengthy consideration of Millikan's lab records and notebooks, now in the Caltech Archives, Goodstein delivers a verdict of "not guilty," saying that Millikan's critics have misunderstood the nature of what he was trying to achieve and misinterpreted how he recorded his experimental results.

"That's an original contribution," Goodstein says. "I'm sure the debate about Millikan will go on, but I think I've got the facts straight."

"I wanted to publish a book that dealt with actual instances of science fraud, not manufactured 'case histories,'" says Goodstein. Credit: Robert Paz

Goodstein devotes a long and lively chapter to what he calls the "curious case of cold fusion," examining the controversy from numerous professional and personal perspectives. The final word on the validity of cold fusion may not yet be in, he says, but in any case, mistaken ideas about how nature works do not constitute scientific misconduct—although they can offer illuminating and even comic insights into how science is done.

"Scientific research is very complicated," Goodstein says. "Even good results can be wrong. But it's all right to be wrong in science. That's not a matter of fraud." Science, like any human enterprise, is full of nuance and subtlety, he notes. What is most important is to ensure that it is carried out with integrity and a scrupulous regard for accurately presenting the facts.