Richard Lewontin - Fraud in Science

Richard Lewontin's November 2004 article in the NYR, discussing fraud in science provoked two letters disputing the facts of the examples he presented. He replies defending his interpretation of the facts of the cases. At the time, I also noted a couple of oddities, and thought someone might write in about those. They didn't, so I may as well pop them up here.

First, he recounted the talmudic story about a divine voice intervening in a dispute between sages. As recounted in Baba Meziah, Rabbi Joshua proclaims that legal disputes are the purview of the Rabbis and that no attention will be paid to heavenly voices. In the Lewontin version, it became "well that just makes it two against three" - a conclusion more relevant to his discussion of the role of privileged knowledge in democracy, but not faithful to the source he cites.

Secondly, he discloses that a clever acquaintance of his once cunningly cultivated a vector from an envelope sent by a rival lab. This old chestnut is known to every graduate student in molecular biology. It's an urban legend going back to at least the early 70s in multiple versions with many different alleged protagonists.

So its a nice paradox... in an article about fraud, Lewontin managed to 'sex-up' one story and mischaracterize an infamous anecdote as personal insight.

Well - I guess there's nothing like teaching by example!