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Of the Smear
(Editor's note: This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1989. To return to today's column, click here.)
Imagine that you won a Nobel Prize at age 37. That you've published some 400 papers on genetics and the human immune system. That you've built from scratch a highly respected scientific research center, the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass.
And then imagine that you wake up one morning and read in the hometown paper that you're accused of what "appears to be fraud and . . . misrepresentation." The accusation is from a "Pete Stockton," whom you've never met, but who the paper says is a "staff member for Rep. John Dingell."
That's more or less what happened to David Baltimore a year ago. His experience since has taken him into the Kafka maw of "congressional oversight," Dingell-style. Readers of this space will recall that the last time we checked with Congress's grand inquisitor, Chairman Dingell was retreating from a botched attempt to smear a former federal prosecutor. Now he's assailing Dr. Baltimore and, to make the effort really worthwhile, American science.
Bearded and youthful at 51, David Baltimore speaks with the owlish intensity of a man seeking justice. He can't believe what's happening. In the year since that newspaper bombshell, his life has been turned inside out by the demands of the Dingell staff.
"It has been a revelation to me the kind of power that a man like John Dingell has," says Dr. Baltimore, a rational man suddenly exposed to the rituals of Washington. "I had no idea. . . . Congress has a reputation that I thought had been in some ways cleaned up from the days of McCarthy and McCarran. It's clear when you look at Dingell that that's not true."
Dr. Baltimore has had to make available piles of documents, some of them personal. He's run up "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in legal bills. He's had to mount a campaign to protect his reputation after his name was tossed around in two congressional hearings on "scientific fraud." Yet he was never notified of those hearings. When he wrote John Dingell last August to request a face-to-face meeting, he never heard back.
Dr. Baltimore finally got time in Congress's public court yesterday. It was the familiar Dingell showcase: the chairman's peroration laying out his "serious questions" about the "integrity and judgment" of Dr. Baltimore and his colleagues; the stentorian references to the witnesses' "rights"; the prosecutorial questioning. By the time I left to meet a deadline, the question of the day had been whether mistakes in a paper published by Dr. Baltimore and others amounted to mere "errors" or--as the dastardly implication hung in the air--"misconduct."
The controversy focuses on Dr. Baltimore's paper, published in 1986 in Cell, a magazine of molecular biology (and no doubt must reading in Congress). A technical dispute between one of the paper's coauthors and a research associate (a "whistle-blower," in Dingell parlance) bounced to the level of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Baltimore is a professor of biology; then to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where Mr. Dingell's staff heard about it.
Thus began what Dr. Baltimore calls a "relentless campaign" to prove the authors' bad faith. NIH conducted a probe that found technical errors, but not fraud or misconduct. Unsatisfied, Mr. Dingell even called in the Secret Service to pore over the authors' notebooks. The paper's conclusion and basic premises still haven't been contradicted.
Even if some "misconduct" were proved, the salient question would remain why the U.S. Congress should care. Good science requires freedom, especially the freedom to blunder.
"Error is the stuff of science," explains Dr. Baltimore. "Scientists risk everything when they publish because they risk their reputations." If a scientist makes mistakes or commits fraud, his results will in the normal course of events be reviewed, found wanting and exposed. Like the "fusion" scientists in Utah, he will face the withering scrutiny of his peers.
John Dingell wants to protect "whistle-blowers," but science can't function with outside auditors. He and his allies would risk regimenting science, bureaucratizing it in such a way as to destroy science. Already, says Dr. Baltimore, the investigation has deterred scientists in his own lab from pursuing his Cell research, lest they too be dragged before Congress. Yet it is this kind of research that could yield cures for lupus, cancer, even AIDS.
Mr. Dingell says he'd never, ever seek to "police science." But then why did he call in the Secret Service (a.k.a., the Treasury police)? And why intimidate the National Institutes of Health into setting up a new Office of Scientific Integrity? If the science police have their way, says Dr. Baltimore, "the truly creative would be driven from science or from America."
The first time I met John Dingell I must admit to coming away with some respect for his intelligence and rough-hewn candor. But the more I've watched him and his investigators at work, the more it's clear that they are manning a runaway train. The arrogance bred of unchallenged power has stripped them of self-restraint and distorted their understanding of the public good.
