Postscript: Political Science
345
This man, a well-connected Purdue University embryologist, had for
several years been making it a habit to ridicule my work in some of his
own papers, while using it without credit as the basis of his own in
other publications. In 1978, in response to a Saturday Review article
describing regeneration work by me and others, a member of his lab had
written a long, vituperative letter to the editor accusing me of "bad
science" that had "made life difficult" for real researchers like him and
his partners. He accused me of falsifying data on the rat limb experi-
ment. He said the results I'd reported in three days were impossible,
even though he'd never bothered to repeat the experiment himself. He
ridiculed a claim that blastemas arose from white blood cells, an assertion
that neither I nor anyone else had ever made. He accused me of misquot-
ing other scientists' work to support my own ends. He charged me and
Stephen Smith with trying to pass off a photo of an intact frog as one
that had regrown a complete leg in one of Smith's experiments. Finally,
he castigated me for avoiding scientific journals in favor of publishing
my results in the popular press, even though I'd had well over a hundred
papers printed in the peer-reviewed literature.
Steve Smith was moved to answer the letter point by point, closing
with a denunciation of establishment scientists who responded to new
ideas with ridicule and slander. Furthermore, he concluded, "I do not
understand the rationale of those who feel that research is some obscure
process whose results should be made known to the public only as a
series of miraculous revelations. The decision as to what kind of research
to support is essentially a political one in this day and age, and I firmly
believe that an informed public opinion is a much better basis for that
decision than general obfuscation."
Normally even the most scurrilous charges are thrashed out in the
technical journals, however inadequate that process may be. The letter
writer, however, took it upon himself to send a copy to one of the
overseers of NIH funding. I suppose I could consider myself lucky that
by then there was no more damage anyone could do me in that quarter.
The eminent embryologist's vendetta continued into 1980. In Febru-
ary of that year, the Purdue Office of Public Information issued a press
release lauding the great man's own research and presenting him as a
white knight doing single combat against "myths." In it he accused me
of "plain ordinary fraud," repeating the accusations from his assistant's
letter. As a result, I sent the president of Purdue a long, detailed letter
itemizing
his
employee's actions during
the
past
several
years,
and
threatening to sue both him and the university. Immediately I got a call
from
the embryologist, in which he
claimed
he
never meant anything
like that, and asking what I planned to do.
I asked to see some apologies