The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
"You read with a rising sense of despair and outrage, and you finish it as if awakening from a nightmare only Kafka could have conceived."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1975. Known as a wunderkind in the field of immunology, he rose quickly through the ranks of the scientific community to become the president of the distinguished Rockefeller University. Less than a year and a half later, Baltimore resigned from his presidency, citing the personal toll of fighting a long battle over an allegedly fraudulent paper he had collaborated on in 1986 while at MIT. From the beginning, the Baltimore case provided a moveable feast for those eager to hold science more accountable to the public that subsidizes its research. Did Baltimore stonewall a legitimate government inquiry? Or was he the victim of witch hunters? The Baltimore Case tells the complete story of this complex affair, reminding us how important the issues of government oversight and scientific integrity have become in a culture in which increasingly complicated technology widens the divide between scientists and society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping tale of high-stakes research science colliding with headline-grabbing congressional investigations, careers and reputations are part of the wreckage. Kevles (The Physicists, etc.), a professor of humanities and scientific policy at CIT, takes readers into the esoteric realm of molecular biology to explore one of the most controversial ethical cases in modern scientific history. In 1986, David Baltimore, a 1975 Nobel laureate in medicine, coauthored a research paper on gene transfer in Cell magazine with a former MIT associate, Thereza Imanishi-Kari. When a postdoctoral fellow in Imanishi-Kari's lab could not duplicate the results of the experiment as described in the article, then made her concerns public, charges of fraud began to erupt that eventually involved scientists at Harvard, Tufts, MIT and the National Institutes of Health. According to Kevles's report, scientific gadflies at the NIH, in concert with an egoistic congressional committee chairman and moralizing scientists, opened a decade-long witch hunt that split the academic science community and nearly destroyed the professional lives of Baltimore and Imanishi-Kari. This analysis of a scandal within a scandal, which includes a brief account of the disputed experiment, breaches the high walls of science and politics for a close-up look at the dispute, with Kevles's fast-paced journalistic style rendering a recondite subject immediate and accessible for the lay reader. Photos.
