Justice in the Laboratory

For a decade, Nobel laureate David Baltimore and immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari endured an ordeal worthy of Kafka. It started with "whistle-blowing" by a postdoctoral assistant. Imanishi-Kari was accused of  faking data for a paper co-authored by Baltimore. He strongly defended her and was forced to quit the presidency of Rockefeller University as a result, while Imanishi-Kari, now at Tufts University, had her reputation besmirched and a federal research grant terminated. Recently, their ordeal came to an end when a federal appeals panel cleared her of the fraud charges. In the future, argues Kevles, director of the Program in Science, Ethics, and Public Policy at the California Institute of Technology, scientific misconduct cases should be handled very differently.

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