Future Fraud

IN AN OPEN LETTER to the Medical School faculty last week, Dean Daniel C. Tosteson expressed his concern about research fraud in the scientific community and called for suggestions on how to prevent it. In effect, he has tacked a suggestion box to the great marble pillars of Building A. We would drop by with the following note.

Despite its overblown style, the open letter is a rare show of frankness. It does not proclaim from on high that the problem of fraud in scientific research will be taken care of. Instead it says: we're stumped, got any ideas? That is not the typical way Harvard administrators deal with problems. Such openness from administrators is always welcome, though in this instance it seems motivated by the peculiar knottiness of the problem.

Two major cases of fraud at the Medical School have prompted concern, though Tosteson does not cite them in his letter. The first came in 1981, when an associate professor in a laboratory at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, John R. Darsee, admitted to fabricating data. An investigation resulted in the retraction of a series of reported findings in scientific journals. The recent disclosure of misconduct by a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ellis Reinherz at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has lent a kind of scientific confirmation to the occurrence of fraud at Harvard. The professional misbehavior has been independently repeated, gaining the same criterion of reliability that the errant scientists' research could not.

What the scientific community needs to remember, however, is that research fraud is not just another tough puzzle to solve. Implementing a policy change in the peer review system or in the structure of research supervision may not address the irrational, and perhaps bizarre, element in scientific fraud: that dishonesty will almost certainly be found out, as scientists attempt to repeat and build on each other's work.

This irrational element shows the need for a reassessment of the environment of scientific research, rather than a quick fix. The dean could perhaps help to resolve his own perplexity about research fraud, if he remembered that he presides over an institution that creates the "pressure" to perform--the explanation often cited by unscrupulous scientists for their misconduct.

Yet the open letter does represent an important step beyond the dean's previous communications on the subject. At those times, the administration established guidelines for dealing with future cases, should they arise, and set up a committee to investigate fraud after the fact. Those approaches betray the hesitancy with which Med School administrators planned for future fraud. Apparently they did not know what to expect.

In contrast, last week's open letter sets up not a committee of investigation, but one of prevention. We trust that the letter represents a real change in stance from hindsight to foresight.