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 PRIZE FIGHT
Copyright © Morton A. Meyers, 2012.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978–0–230–33890–6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Morton A.
Prize fight : the race and the rivalry to be the first in science /
Morton A. Meyers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–33890–6 (hardback)
1. Research—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Scientists—Psychology.
3. Scientists—Professional relationships. I. Title.

Q180.55.M67M49 2012
174⬘.95—dc23 2011047900

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: June 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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 Contents

Introduction “Look Away from the Ball” 1

Part I
1 Stolen Credit: A Universal Outrage 13
2 The Art of Science 27
3 Staking the Claim 35
4 The Dark Side of Science 47

Part II
5 “Drop Everything!” 67
6 The Star Pupil 85
7 Shock Waves in Academia 117
8 “This Shameful Wrong Must Be Righted!” 123
9 The Race Is On 145
10 The Tipping Point 171
11 Obsession 183
12 Picking the Winner 197
Epilogue 223

Acknowledgments 233
Notes 235
Selected Bibliography 253
Illustration Credits 255
Index 257

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 Introduction

“Look Away from

the Ball”

I n basketball this rule highlights how the game is really played. The point
guard of a college basketball team once asked his coach how he could
improve his playing. The coach asked him what he did in practice. “Pass,
dribble, and shoot,” the player replied, indicating that he kept the ball in his
control. The coach nodded his head and told him to have someone clock
how much time he actually spent handling the ball in a regulation game. The
player was surprised to find that he had his hands on the basketball less than
three total minutes out of a forty-minute game.
“What do you learn from that?” asked his coach.
“Beats me,” said the player.
“You learn,” said the coach, “that most of the game is played away from
the ball.”1
A good game of basketball is not just exciting slam-dunks and three-
point shots; it also involves competitive spirit, the race against the clock,
fouls, time-outs, and, of course, overall strategy. The real challenge is not
to focus on where the ball is at any particular moment but rather where it
is likely to be in the next play. Sportswriters tend to burnish the image of a
particular player without due acknowledgment of the contributions of the
teammates or the aggressive actions of the opposing players.
So it is in science. The Lasker Awards, presented by the American Lasker
Foundation, are announced at the end of September and often presage future

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 2 Prize Fight

recognition by the Nobel committee, so they have become popularly known

as “America’s Nobels.” The Nobel Prizes, the jewel in the crown of scientific
achievements, are announced in October each year. But it is not just the
announcement and recognition of a scientific discovery that is meaningful.
We must also “look away from the ball.” We must seek to understand the
continuing process, the enduring fundamentals, the richly textured human
dramas swirling around pivotal discoveries that are as true and relevant today
as they were yesterday. To focus solely or predominantly on the science dis-
tracts from the underlying human factors. The lens through which these
human interactions can be meaningfully viewed is the domain of the sociol-
ogy of science.
This book explores a fundamental question underlying scientific research.
Whose work earns the hallmark of priority for an original meaningful dis-
covery of a scientific truth? How is credit determined, allocated, and con-
tested? The literature contains very little on the subject, despite the fact that
it is a pervasive source of discomfort, and not uncommonly agony, among
researchers. This is reflected in the acceptance speech by one of the winners
of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, H. David Politzer, noteworthy for his
unusually candid portrayal of the human interactions involved. The address
is cogently titled “The Dilemma of Attribution.” Politzer concludes: “More
of the public should contemplate these matters [regarding the competitive
drive for recognition] if they wish to understand not just the ideas of science
but also how they have developed.”2
Even in disparate academic circles, the issue of allocation and misal-
location of credit has generally received scant notice. A controversy over
proper attribution within one discipline hardly causes a ripple within
another. Should it receive attention in the media, it is usually shrugged off
as an aberration, a misadventure under a set of unique circumstances. But
in 2003 the unprecedented public outburst by Raymond Damadian over
his exclusion from being awarded the Noble Prize for magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) revealed the all-too-human passions behind the headlines.
MRI was not an abstract advance of remotely theoretical potential but one
of practical benefits familiar to many. Damadian’s outburst was an appeal
to the general public—MRI now being a household term—as well as the
scientific community and the Nobel committee.

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 Introduction 3

And then in October 2010, the long-simmering dispute over the pri-
ority of identification of the AIDS virus—which had required the personal
intervention of the president of the United States and the prime minister
of France—was officially resolved with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in
medicine to Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The contro-
versy fomented aggressive behavior between Montagnier and his rival, Robert
Gallo, a respected researcher at the National Cancer Institute, and attracted
the attention of scientists, physicians, AIDS activists, government officials,
and the general public.

Today ’s Problem

Recently, a number of instances of fraudulent research reports, typically from

premier institutions in the United States, received wide publication in the
popular press. Indeed, in just the last few years, there has been an explosion
of widely reported cases of scientific misconduct in the press.
In August 2010, as reported on the front page of the New York Times,
Harvard University found Marc Hauser, a prominent researcher in animal
cognition and morality, “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific
misconduct. Dr. Hauser’s difficulties began when a research assistant accused
him of subjectively influencing assessments of primate behavior. Based on
this, in 2007 university officials went into his lab one afternoon while he
was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records. Some of his data
were found to be missing, and critics have since challenged Hauser’s pub-
lished results as incorrect or unconvincing.
In 2008, Linda R. Buck, a 2004 Nobel laureate in physiology or medi-
cine for deciphering the workings of the sense of smell, retracted a 2001
paper that had been published in Nature. In September 2010, she retracted
two more published papers, one from Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences in 2005, one from Science in 2006. The retractions did not con-
cern the work for which Dr. Buck won the Nobel Prize. However, the first
author of all three retracted papers was a postdoctoral researcher who had
conducted the experiments in Dr. Buck’s lab. Dr. Buck was unable to repro-
duce the key findings in these papers; her figures were inconsistent with the
original data.

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 4 Prize Fight

In October 2010, three Harvard researchers retracted a paper published

in Nature that had the far-reaching claim that the aging of stem cells might
be reversible. Called into question was the reliability of the data from one
of the authors, a postdoctoral student who performed the experiments in
young mice and analyzed the results.
In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published an arti-
cle in The Lancet that linked childhood vaccinations to autism. In January
2011, the study was renounced by 10 of the 13 authors and retracted by the
medical journal. An editorial in the medical journal British Medical Journal
has denounced the study as “an elaborate fraud.” While the other scandals
I’ve mentioned involved perhaps more esoteric subjects, this particular piece
of fallacious research affected millions of parents in the United States who,
fearing the contagion of autism more than that of chicken pox, diphtheria,
whooping cough, and measles, prohibited their pediatricians from inoculat-
ing their young children. One can only speculate on whether the fears stirred
up by this discredited bit of science have led to the current mini-epidemic of
measles. (According to the CDC, more cases of measles were reported in 2008
than had been in any other year since 1997. Over 90 percent of those infected
had not been vaccinated or their treatment status was unknown.) And what of
the angst and self-blame that parents of autistic children must have felt?
The vaccine/autism affair makes clear that these kinds of scandals don’t
merely exist in the ivory towers of academe or in the white-coated confines
of the lab. They have real-life repercussions for all of us.
In these high-profile retractions, it is unclear whether the highly charged,
competitive nature of science puts pressure on researchers, causing everyone
from the postdoctoral student to the primary investigator to cut corners, or
whether the laboratory or clinical chief creates an atmosphere that induces
cheating. But whatever the cause, now there is no question that the impassioned
race in scientific research for recognition and rewards—with its bitter conflicts
over priority and credit—has been brought to public awareness.

The Truth about Scientists

The scientist is generally viewed as detached, objective, dispassionate.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The coin of the realm is originality

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 Introduction 5

and creativity, but the joy of discovery, the exaltation of uncovering a law of
nature, while a powerful motivation, is not enough.
Science grows out of an intense compulsion to understand, to make
sense of the world around us. Carl Sagan eloquently framed the issue:
“For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at
the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is
known would be static and dull . . . A universe that is unknowable is not a
fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much
like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that is not really much of
a coincidence.”3
Yet while discovery provides extreme excitement, scientists also covet
recognition for their work. The reward may be not only high regard by peers,
but a prize, an acknowledged victory. This is an intrinsic part of the field’s
culture, but it’s not one scientists advertise to the general public.
The scientific enterprise brims over with competition, battles, and injus-
tices. Conflicts may be resolved in an amicable fashion or may ignite bitter
recriminations. Scientists are as subject to pride, greed, jealousy, and ambi-
tion, just like the rest of us. The race to be first can lead to superhuman effort
and can, perhaps, even speed up the desired result. Disputes over who got
there first often reveal how temperament, personal ambition, and antago-
nisms all too often influence the course of events.

Ahead of Its Time

A lot of the problem starts with the fact that the public is not always pre-
pared to accept a major scientific discovery. Scientists themselves may force-
fully deny the value of a new concept that clashes with accepted facts. Such
resistance and neglect contradict the stereotype of the scientist as an open-
minded searcher of the truth. An accomplishment labeled “ahead of its time”
may be rejected simply because it was produced before it could be generally
understood or before it could be technically confirmed. This can create open
conflict when the scientist who discovered the new concept supports his
discovery with unshakeable certainty.
In 1632, Galileo defended the heliocentric Copernican system in dis-
regard of the Church’s admonition. He was finally tried by the Inquisition

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 6 Prize Fight

and under threat of torture recanted. Legend has it that as he left the tri-
bunal, he murmured under his breath regarding our planet, “Eppur si
muove!” (“And yet it moves!”). Old conflicts die hard: The sentence passed
on Galileo by the Inquisition was formally retracted by Pope John Paul II
only on October 31, 1992.
The work of Gregor Mendel laid the foundation of modern genetics, but
its importance went unrecognized for over forty years.4 Mendel’s prophetic
remark, “My time will come,” reveals no doubt on his part.5 In the history of
modern biology, Mendel’s article is probably secondary in importance only
to Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
Barbara McClintock finally won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1983,
thirty years after she began presenting her revolutionary work on genes
jumping within a chromosome. Scientists simply could not reconcile her
conclusions on transposable elements with the prevailing belief in the stabil-
ity of genes on the chromosomes. As one expert explained, “it was so far out
that no one could relate it to anything anyone at the time knew about the
genome.”
Fifty-five years after his breakthrough discovery of a cancer-inducing
virus, Peyton Rous, at age eighty-five, was awarded the Nobel Prize. In
response to his 1911 paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the
official publication of the Rockefeller Institute, critics scoffed that there
must have been a hole either in the filter he used for his supposed cell-free
experiments or in his head.6 His insight had to await a favorable intellectual
climate and technologic advances.
Central to the narrative I present in Prize Fight, especially in Part II,
are two emblematic breakthroughs that earned each major researcher a
Nobel Prize, yet resulted in acrimonious conflicts over priority and credit.
In one case, the “hurt” and efforts at rehabilitation lasted fifty years and
in the second, thirty years. Each story is marked by raw competitiveness
and guile, with dramatic turning points. Both conflicts were considera-
bly unprecedented in their own eras due to the very public nature of the
disputes.
The first story involves Selman Waksman, an internationally renowned
scientist at Rutgers University. Waksman began a screening program for anti-
biotics derived from soil microbes, literally from the ground he walked on. A

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 Introduction 7

young graduate student in Waksman’s laboratory, Albert Schatz, uncovered a

new antibiotic, streptomycin, which was proved by clinical trials at the Mayo
Clinic to be the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. The discovery
was hailed as a major life-saving advance. This wonder drug, along with peni-
cillin, opened the antibiotic era. Schatz was the senior author of the reports
and shared the patent with Waksman, who nevertheless undertook a series
of stratagems to marginalize Schatz. In an increasingly bitter exchange of let-
ters, Waksman viewed Schatz as “my hands, my tools” as well as “a cog in a
wheel” of his own fundamental research. Schatz tried to counter this, as well as
Waksman’s threats to his career, with his own ruses. The most important thing
to him was ownership of his work. He wanted recognition for his research.
The second narrative involves my colleague, Paul Lauterbur, a physical
chemist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Lauterbur had an
epiphany, a “flash of genius,” that transformed a basic technique used by chem-
ists and physicists, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), into a clinical diagnos-
tic method now employed worldwide—magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Today it is a billion-dollar industry with more than 60 million medical diagnos-
tic scans performed worldwide each year. Who has not had or known someone
who has had an MRI study? Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003.
These facts alone do not suggest the underlying fiery dispute that raged
for thirty years around the development of MRI. Raymond Damadian, a
physician-researcher at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn,
had published the seminal paper that first directed the attention of chem-
ists to the vast medical potentials of NMR. Lauterbur cited this report in
his grant applications for funding but chose not to cite it in his first paper
introducing the procedure’s imaging capability to the scientific community.
Damadian became convinced that Lauterbur was exploiting his work.
My sources include extensive archival material from Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Temple University in Philadelphia, con-
taining voluminous correspondence, memos, personal reflections, pre-trial
depositions, photos, and movies; and contemporary accounts, memoirs,
extensive in-depth interviews, as well as my direct personal involvement in
Lauterbur’s productive years.
Basic to the integrity of scientific research are issues of intellectual prop-
erty rights, peer review, and authorship related to allocation of credit. As an

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 8 Prize Fight

author of over 200 scientific papers and an editor of medical books and jour-
nals, I deal with these issues of peer review, authorship, and credit every day.
These are important not only for the approbation by peers but also for much
more practical reasons: They lead to promotions, funding, tenure, and status.
Indeed, I had become particularly sensitized to the highly competitive nature
of scientific investigation because of my direct encounter with the Lauterbur/
Damadian conflict at the medical school where I taught. This led me on a
quest to understand such behavior among scientists, and in so doing I uncov-
ered a little noted but fundamental pattern among my colleagues involving
self-interest, competiveness, and the battle for recognition and reward. To be
first is paramount. To be second is to be forgotten.
Complementing these two detailed cases are other profiles of discover-
ers that illustrate these dynamic human characteristics. They are most fully
appreciated in the context of the underlying cultural as well as scientific fac-
tors. Among the subjects explored:

• Priority in the history of science. Who was the first to uncover or to

interpret the meaningfulness of a new scientific truth? How conflicts
underscore that proper credit is a bid for immortality, overcoming a
fear of being written out of history.
• The creative impulse and similarities between science and art. Both are
passionate enterprises that are generated by similar personal character-
istics. How passionate an enterprise science is and how like artists sci-
entists are.
• Changes in the depiction of scientists in popular books from
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis to Intuition by Allegra Goodman. How
the perspective of the nobility of research has become modified over
time by the goal of personal fame and glory.
• Flaws in the system of peer review that may stifle innovation with
common rejection of what ultimately prove to be major advances.
• Deserving contributions that have gone unrewarded by awards
committees.
• Examples of the dark side of science, fraud, which not only exploits
the flaws in the bedrock of the discipline but also provides insights
into the pressures of research coupled with the vanity of celebrity.

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 Introduction 9

Science arises from the relentless urge to know. While competition may
be beneficial to spur scientists toward discovery, it can also stymie progress.
The inherent competition in scientific research, pervasive yet not frequently
acknowledged, may stifle young minds and make them afraid to be innova-
tive. This is because the peer review process is arbitrated by senior experts in
the field who tend to follow the tail of the comet and may lack the imagi-
nation to recognize ingenuity. To understand the interplay of these factors
within science benefits us greatly. It allows us to be wiser to the complexities—
intellectual, technical, and human—in the scientific endeavor, the proper rec-
ognition of credit for achievements, the mentorship of new scientists, and the
allocation of research funding and resources.

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9780230338906_02_Int.indd 10 3/20/2012 10:24:35 AM
 PRIZE FIGHT

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