A review of The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character
By Daniel Kevles
(Norton, 1998, 508 pages)

In 1975 Swarthmore College, where I had just enrolled as a freshman, greeted with delight the news that one of its alumni, David Baltimore, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. It was further proof to me, and the rest of the college, of Swarthmore’s impeccable credentials.

Imagine my surprise when in 1988 Baltimore was accused of scientific fraud and subsequently tarred and feathered by the media. You see, Swarthmore was not the kind of place where pre-meds ruined others’ biology and chemistry experiments. It was a place where students collaborated, and would walk down to dinner discussing academic problems, papers and seminars. No respectable alum would do what Baltimore was accused of.

Sure enough, the eminent scientific historian Daniel J. Kevles has just written a minutely researched 500-page tome that exonerates Baltimore. The books spans from 1986, when the controversy began, and ends in 1996, when Baltimore and his colleague Thereza Imanishi-Kari were finally exonerated. It provides an engrossing description of how a seemingly minor dispute became the subject of a full-fledged investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The seeds of a scientific controversy

The book alternates between descriptions of the scientific experiment in question and the politics of the controversy. Kevles’ successfully translates complex science into English for the layman, as he did in previous works, such as The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America and In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. (His wife, Bettyann Kevles, shares the same skill, and her latest book, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, provides a fascinating and readable history of radiology.)

The seeds of the controversy were sown when Margot O’Toole, a post-doctoral fellow working in the laboratory of Imanishi-Kari at MIT, could not replicate an experiment performed by her boss. Imanishi-Kari, working on research into the immune system with Baltimore, was using mice to study rearrangement in the formation of antibodies. A foreign gene was inserted into fertilized mice eggs to create mice with a new gene, and this appeared to stimulate the mice to produce antibodies native to the mice, contrary to what theory predicted. The results were published in the scientific journal Cell in April 1986.

Not only could O’Toole not replicate part of the experiment, but she found pages of a notebook that appeared to contradict the published article. She met with scientists both at MIT and at Tufts, where Imanishi-Kari had subsequently moved, to try to resolve what she saw as scientific errors. The scientists agreed that some minor errors had occurred, but concluded that the basic results of the paper were still valid.

The disagreement moved outside the science community when a disgruntled former MIT colleague contacted two NIH biologists who had taken it upon themselves to hunt down fraudulent science. These biologists contacted staffers of Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who were looking for cases to dramatize fraudulent science.

Kevles vividly describes how non-scientists evaluated the research, bringing in the Secret Service to look for forgeries and making a hero out of O’Toole. The ensuing series of hearings make for gripping reading, too long to describe in these pages. It will suffice to say that Baltimore defended himself and Imanishi-Kari against Dingell, making a life-long enemy in the process. Dingell bullied NIH into setting up an investigation that found that Baltimore had committed fraud. And the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services set up a review board that in May 1996 exonerated Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore after hearing their evidence.

Lives harmed; science politicized

The dispute took a terrible professional toll on the two scientists who were in general abandoned by their colleagues. Baltimore was forced to resign the presidency of Rockefeller University after only 18 months, and Imanishi-Kari lost her position at Tufts. Now, in what may be described as a happy ending, Baltimore has assumed the presidency of the California Institute of Technology, and Imanishi-Kari is a tenured professor at Tufts.

But the central problem Kevles describes, that of the politicization of science, is still unsolved. Dingell attempted to review the results of a complex scientific study, a task that would challenge most biologists, solely for political reasons. Kevles clearly makes the point that scientific research survives on the basis of its own merits. Errors in journals are seized upon, not by congressmen, but by other scientists exploring the same areas and trying to make their mark in the field.

However, scientific research continues to be media-driven. Recently an independent panel exonerated breast implants from causing systematic illnesses after almost a decade of discussion and the bankruptcy of Dow Corning. The case was sparked by five women on the Connie Chung show and magnified by greedy lawyers, unscrupulous doctors, a credulous media and hysterical women. Funding for AIDS research far exceeds that of cancer research, again for political reasons. Similarly, funding for breast cancer exceeds that of lung cancer, even though more women die of lung cancer. The list continues.

Daniel Kevles’ research has persuasively cleared the names of Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari. Let us hope that it will also strike a blow for the depoliticization of scientific research.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has collaborated with historian Christine Stolba on two books to be published in the spring: Women’s Figures: The Economic Progress of Women in America and Pride or Prejudice: Do Women Need Affirmative Action?