Boston Globe, NYTimes: Star Harvard psychologist on leave as committee suspects he has holes in his papers
On Tuesday the Boston Globe‘s Carolyn Y. Johnson broke news of a well-known Harvard professor in hot water, and now on a year’s leave, over evidence of “scientific misconduct in his laboratory.” A paper has been retracted already. Other papers are getting the gimlet-eye treatment at journals that ran them.
Interesting is that the investigation of the professor, Marc Hauser, author of the book “Moral Minds,” has been underway for three years without, far as I know, media coverage or other public discussion. Johnson handles a delicate and difficult story well – making clear to readers that much about the allegations and the professor’s status is murky. But there is no doubt that the Harvard review is serious business.
The work under review reports evidence in cotton top tamarin monkeys of self-awareness, empathy, and other higher-order cognitive traits that are intensely expressed in people but harder to see in other creatures.
This morning the NYTimes‘s Nicholas Wade provides his own rendition of the same news. He indirectly acknowledges the Globe’s scoop by crediting a quote to the Boston newspaper – which the NYTimes Company owns. Unclear is whether he was already working on this when the Globe ran its piece. Wade reports that he got stonewalled on some aspects of the story when he called a Harvard press officer. He got the info anyway.
Notably, Wade offers one assessment of why the professor is facing difficulty, and does so without using a source to say it for him. He declares that when analyzing videotapes of primate behavior “It is easy for human observers to see the response they want and so to be fooled by the monkeys.” That seems a good hint to readers that what is behind the news may be sloppy science or self-deception, but not necessarily conscious and willful fraud in data handling.
Also notable in a small way is the reference in Wade’s story to one person involved as being at the University of South California. That’s obviously a typing flub. But how can it go through edit intact? It just doesn’t look right. Has not everybody at the Times including on the copy desk heard of the University of Southern California, which it should have said, often enough to double check? (At Cal Berkeley when I was there we called it the University of Spoiled Children, which was dumb. That was before I wound up in grad school there. And my Dad’s a USC fan who took us as kids to USC football games. So it was double dumb for me to join in the chants at Cal. But it was always Southern Cal, never South Cal).
This affair is a good chance to circulate word of a new resource for science writers, especially those who follow the ethical dimensions and mechanics of both science journalism and science itself. Ivan Oransky, the MD, former Scientific American, now Reuters Health and NYU journalism school man who already runs the site Embargo Watch, has added a second pipeline into the workings of science: Retraction Watch. Here’s the latter’s post on the Marc Hauser news.
- Charlie Petit
