Book Review

The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science

N Engl J Med 2005; 352:1615April 14, 2005

Article

The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science
By Horace Freeland Judson. 463 pp. New York, Harcourt, 2004. $28. ISBN: 0-15-100877-9

Irrespective of the difficulty in determining its incidence, misconduct in research — fraud, falsification, and plagiarism — has a corrosive effect on the scientific enterprise. It violates the norms of scientific integrity, leads researchers down spurious paths, and, in the case of clinical research, uses false data to endorse treatments. Misconduct erodes trust among researchers and the public's confidence in and support of research. Moreover, good-faith whistle-blowers can suffer devastating personal and professional consequences, and institutions must bear the burden of the human and financial costs of investigating allegations of misconduct.

In The Great Betrayal, Horace Freeland Judson discusses these and other aspects of misconduct in research and the resulting effects on the scientific enterprise. He chronicles and analyzes a range of recent and historically distant cases in various scientific fields and countries. In this book, Judson displays his talents as a science writer and contemporary historian who is skilled in interviewing and observing and collecting and using primary source documents. His analysis buttresses the view that incidents of misconduct in research are not idiosyncratic, isolated events. Rather, he argues convincingly, they involve patterns that arise from “a culture of fraud,” which is not confined to science but exists within — and is attributable to certain features of — many other professions.

I found Judson's treatment of two topics particularly informative and insightful. The first is peer review of grant applications and manuscripts. The fairness of the present methods of peer review is under attack, and the susceptibility of the present system to corruption (Judson's word) vigorously debated. The second topic is the importance of authorship in the social system of science. With support from actual case histories, Judson examines why the theft of intellectual property, including the many varieties of plagiarism, is such a serious misdeed. He also discusses the failure to give authors credit when it is due and the awarding of “gift” or “ghost” authorship.

In the book's epilogue, Judson presents his reasons for believing that the sciences, in accordance with inexorable “Malthusian limits,” are at an “inevitable” stage of transition from growth to a “steady state.” His corollary thesis is that “the transition to the steady state is fraud's deep context.” Although I am not fully persuaded by the case he makes for an approaching steady state — which, he is careful to point out, does not mean “the end of science” — his argument is thought-provoking. Nor am I convinced that a transitional phase is the “deep context” of fraud, given the long history of fraud in science and the varieties of fraud in many other professions. But if Judson is even partially correct, these matters have a significant bearing on misconduct in research, on the ways in which it is handled (or not) by institutions, and on the steps that could be taken to curtail misconduct and improve the responses to it.

The Great Betrayal merits a wide readership, especially among those who are concerned with the responsible conduct of research. Even experts on misconduct will find a wealth of material in this book. One can only hope that people who still obdurately insist that misconduct is not a serious problem because it is a rare event committed by a few “bad apples,” or because science is a self-correcting enterprise, will read this important book.

Judith P. Swazey, Ph.D.
Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health, Boston, MA 02118
jswazey@midmaine.com