AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU USE DIAL?

A title like Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in Science (Simon & Schuster, 1982) makes one hope that at last someone has written a book on the fraud of the regulatory "scientists" who persecute imagined carcinogens (chemical and radioactive) while covering up those supplied by Nature, and who sit on commissions (such as the NRC) making careers by damaging public health; that someone at last has exposed the deceit of the ex-scientists and their hyper-venality (by which I mean that they will not manipulate their "science," for mere money, but for political expediency and ideological power).

But the book merely deals with petty frauds, some of them true, e.g. the faked experiments with niece by Harvard medical researchers that came to light in 1981. Such incidents do, of course, happen, for scientists have their share of rogues just like pilots, priests or pugilists. The reason why this is not overly important is that no group is as relentlessly self-policed as the scientific community. Hundreds of graduate students, faculty and industrial scientists in every esoteric specially are poised to pounce on the slightest error, each hoping to be one of the chosen who will carry away another citation in the publish-or-perish game. Is it then useful at least as a compendium of such petty frauds?

No. Much of it is misleading, some of it false, and lots of it anti-scientific (there is a chapter on the "myth" of logic in science). This is not surprising, for one of the authors is none other than Nicholas Wade [AtE Dec 81, Apr 82, Jul 83], the former Science scribbler whose outrageous antinuclear distortions and omissions earned him a promotion to the New York Times, and the other, W. Broad, is also a "science" reporter of that paper with All the News Printed to Fit. That makes it a book on fire prevention by two arsonists, but it is lower than that: these two puny hacks accuse Sir Isaac Newton of fraud, fudged data, fabrication, hypocrisy and plagiarism.

It remains for the composer of "Aren't you glad you use Dial?" to write a book on the lousy music of Beethoven.