CHAPTER 11

On Science and Scientists: People, Process and Portrayals

A Severe Strain on Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest, part of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising, device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivably parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do. And the rocket, or what was left of it after the last explosion, would have to be aimed with amazing skill, and in a dead calm, to fall on the spot whence it started.

But that is a slight inconvenience, at least from the scientific standpoint, though it might be serious enough from that of the always-innocent bystander a few hundred or thousand yards away from the firing line. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt and looks again, to see if the dispatch announcing the professor’s purposes and hopes says that he is working under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. It does say so, and therefore the impulse to do more than doubt the practicability of such a device for such a purpose must be—well, controlled. Still, to be filled with uneasy wonder and to express it will be safe enough, for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.

His Plan Is Not Original

That Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

But there are such things as Intentional mistakes or oversights, and, as it happens, Jules Verne, who also knew a thing or two in assorted sciences—and had, besides, a surprising amount of prophetic power—deliberately seemed to make the same mistake that Professor Goddard seems to make. For the Frenchman, having got his travelers to or toward the moon into the desperate fix of riding a tiny satellite of the satellite, saved them from circling it forever by means of an explosion, rocket fashion, where an explosion would not have had in the slightest degree the effect of releasing them from their dreadful slavery. That was one of Verne’s few scientific slips, or else it was a deliberate step aside from scientific accuracy, pardonable enough in him as a romancer, but its like is not so easily explained when made by a savant who isn’t writing a novel of adventure.

All the same, if Professor Goddard’s rocket attains sufficient speed before it passes out of our atmosphere—which is a thinkable possibility—and if its aiming takes into account all of the many deflective forces that will affect its flight, it may reach the moon. That the rocket could carry enough explosive to make on impact a flash large and bright enough to be seen from the earth by the biggest of our telescopes—that will be believed when it is done.

—January 13, 1920

A Correction

On Jan. 13, 1920, “Topics of The Times,” an editorial-page feature of The New York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows:

“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

—July 17, 1969

5 Years After the Nobel: Portrait of a Man Obsessed With Science

By HAROLD M. SCHMECK JR.

The picture on the screen, meaningless to a layman, looked like a row of vertical ink blotches on a dirty gray sheet. To the dozen or so young men and women clustered in the room, the blots were an unfinished mystery story.

The patterns showed cloned mouse cells that should have been identical. In fact they had grown into two genetically different populations. How? Why?

Orchestrating the discussion was a bearded man in his early 40s, smoking a pipe, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a dark red sport shirt and suntan pants. His young colleagues addressed him as “David.” He is known to the world at large as Dr. David Baltimore, American Cancer Society Professor of Microbiology at MIT, co-winner of a Nobel Prize and one of the most brilliant and inventive minds in modern American science.

As he and the young scientists tried to make sense of those mouse cells, Dr. Baltimore’s comments were sparse but telling, terminating one line of investigation, encouraging another.

“I don’t think it’s going to be worthwhile to drive that into the ground,” he said at one point. “Good, very good,” he said almost inaudibly at another. One research worker said two specimens seemed to be identical. “No,” Dr. Baltimore said quickly, “they are reversed.” The meeting was informal, conducted at lunchtime with sandwiches from paper bags. Excitement and concentration seemed to wax and wane with the discussion.

Dr. Baltimore sat at the side, only occasionally asking a question or rising to go to the chalkboard. But the speakers seemed to be directing their words as much to him as to the rest of the group.

The young MIT scientists were seeking ways to harness this particular paradox—to make it reveal an underlying truth about the immune defense system of humans and animals.

The cells were precursors of those that produce the disease-fighting substances called antibodies. The experiments, still in progress, might explain something important about the development of these indispensable cells.

Dr. Baltimore’s research style and the way he imparts it to a new generation reveal something of the creative genius of modern biology, something of the fire that has kindled a revolution in human understanding of the chemistry of life on earth.

“I think it’s partly a habit of mind,” he told a visitor. “It involves a kind of obsessiveness. Unless you are obsessed with scientific questions you are not going to get anywhere with them.”

Also needed, he says, is a talent for thinking a logical train of experiments through to its long-term consequences. The layman’s perception is often that of a scientist working doggedly, in lonely dedication, toward some distant goal. The reality, Dr. Baltimore says, is that a scientist must learn to find the path of least resistance through a maze of scientific unknowns, choosing the experiments that are ripe to be done, even backing off from a tough problem until some new insight or new technique softens it up.

He once backed off from an impasse in virus research for 17 years and then picked it up again when a new development made the question ripe for solving. The lapse had continued to bother him over the years until he ended it.

Brilliance in scientific research is not a simple talent, nor is it simply explained. The obsessive urge to find answers is clearly a part of it, as is the talent for choosing the right questions. Dr. Baltimore says he wakes up in the morning thinking—and assumes everyone else does, too. There were times in his early career, notably at Rockefeller University, when his waking hours were science and nothing but science; meals were the only breaks in the work, and even these functioned as opportunities to discuss science with colleagues.

A Compulsion to Protest

Once in the Vietnam War years he halted important research for a week in protest against the invasion of Cambodia, all the while feeling the compulsion to make the protest but also the agony over the delay in his experiments.

The ability to devise fruitful experiments is largely a learned talent, he says, that can be passed on to students. The meeting of his laboratory group showed that process at work.

Today Dr. Baltimore’s creative role is mainly that of a catalyst, directing research rather than doing it himself. But his talents and style put an imprint on the work. He is a man of great energy and, some of his students say, a library of valuable information on many aspects of molecular biology.

His current obsessions embrace some of the key fields in molecular biology: study of how viruses reproduce and how some of them transform normal cells to a state like cancer; study of immunology, the internal defense system that tells friend from foe and fights back against invasion by germs and other intruders in the living body.

Central to much of the work is the sometimes controversial recombinant DNA technology. With it, scientists can make limitless copies of the pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid that serve as the genes of all forms of life; can snip and splice and rearrange genes from any species; can combine genetic material from man and mouse, and can grow human genes in bacteria.

Mathematics Came Easy

Dr. Baltimore was introduced to the real obsessions of science as a high school student in the middle 1950s. Mathematics and related fields came easy to him, he recalls, but fascination began to germinate at a summer session for high school students at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me. The young visitors to the famous laboratory listened to lectures, did some research projects and discussed biology with experts.

Although Dr. Baltimore did not decide on a career in science until he was about halfway through his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, he now recognizes the Jackson laboratory experience as a key determinant.

The person he remembers as the “guru” of his group was Howard M. Temin, now of the McArdle Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. The two never worked together after that summer. Neither had more than a passing knowledge of what the other was up to as their careers evolved in the next decade and a half. Their habits of mind, or at least their scientific styles, grew to be far different.

Yet, in one of the ironies of modern science, their research paths converged until, in 1970, they each, independently and unknown to the other, did almost the same experiments with viruses and thereby demolished what many considered a central dogma of modern molecular biology. Five years later they and Dr. Renato Dulbecco, one of the towering figures of modern biology, were awarded the Nobel Prize.

Looking Like Dr. Ehrlich

A photograph of Dr. Baltimore shaking hands with the King of Sweden at the Nobel Prize ceremonies that fall shows the young American scientist dressed in formal costume and looking a little like the actor who played Dr. Paul Ehrlich in the 1940 movie Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet. The film was made approximately the year Dr. Baltimore was born.

In the research cited by the Nobel committee, Drs. Temin and Baltimore had identified a special class of enzymes through which certain viruses could subvert the genetic machinery of the cells they infected.

The two closely related master chemicals of heredity are DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA). The arrangement of chemical subunits in the DNA serves as the genetic code spelling out each message of heredity. One of the key functions of RNA is to form a copy of the DNA and use this as the blueprint for the production of the specific protein coded for by the gene.

It had been almost universally assumed that the flow of information was always from a nucleic acid to protein. Some thought it always from DNA to RNA to protein. That concept left scientists puzzled over the ability of some of the viruses that contained RNA instead of DNA to transform the very nature of the cells they infected—to make them cancerous. Somehow, they reasoned, the virus RNA must be leaving its message permanently in the DNA of the infected cell.

The discovery of the enzymes now known as reverse transcriptases solved that puzzle. Such an enzyme was found by Dr. Temin in a virus that causes cancer in chickens. Dr. Baltimore found his in a virus that causes leukemia in mice. It soon became clear that RNA-containing viruses known to cause cancer in animals had these subversive enzymes while other viruses did not. Their existence, denied on theoretical grounds for years, proved to be a general phenomenon. Students since then have confirmed its profound importance.

On Predicting Creativity

Working closely with about 20 younger scientists today, Dr. Baltimore says he can see in some of them the possibility of creative greatness, although he adds quickly that creativity really defies prediction. Some scientists plug along for decades, then abruptly blossom into brilliant productivity. Others, seemingly racing ahead in the throes of genius, suddenly fade and lose the fire. Some concentrate narrowly. Others leap at creative opportunity where they perceive it.

Dr. Baltimore likes to be in the competitive forefront of a field and does not leave when the field becomes crowded with research workers following the current fashion. He has sometimes been criticized for his zeal in leaping into highly active fields.

The scientist credits association with many brilliant workers for helping shape his talents. Notable among these has been Dr. Alice Huang, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School, an early collaborator on virus research and now his wife.

About six months after he had joined the laboratory of Richard Franklin at Rockefeller Institute (now University) in the early 1960s, he was doing significant work at the forefront of the science of that day. He says he does not know just how this happened, except that he was always allowed to follow his own creative path.

But there were older scientists at that time too who could see talent for creativity taking shape. “There are times in the development of a field of knowledge when the ground for the next major development is laid,” said Dr. Igor Tamm of Rockefeller on an important occasion in 1964.

“David’s teachers and associates have all been impressed with his broad grasp of concepts and the integrative quality of his mind,” he continued. “I there-fore think that David has ample qualifications not only for a productive life in research, but also for a rewarding life in teaching. I expect that his lively interests in science will fire enthusiasm in others; that his insights will illuminate many.”

The occasion was the presentation of David Baltimore for the PhD degree, at the beginning of a creative career whose dimensions are still unfolding.

—August 26, 1980

Uncovering Science: A Perpetual Student Charts a Course Through a Universe of Discoveries

By MALCOLM W. BROWNE

After 22 years as a science writer I recently retired to cut firewood in Vermont and enjoy the memories of an exciting life, in which I covered a half-dozen wars before discovering the deeper satisfaction of observing and reporting the achievements of scientists.

I relished my 17 years as a foreign correspondent, but believe it or not, even the high drama of disaster, violence and political upheaval that dominates front pages can lose its luster for journalists seeking new experiences.

After a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news. When that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, there is always something new under the sun.

In 1977, weary of the sameness of war and politics, I returned to the United States to become a science writer—a transition that almost overwhelmed me at first. Although I had earned my living in a chemical laboratory in the 1950s, I had almost forgotten how speedily science booms along.

As a trivial example, in the last quarter century alone the American Chemical Society has added more than 10 million chemical substances to its list of known molecules, most of them man-made. Stupendous strides in chemical synthesis have given the world a wealth of new materials and drugs, and have created entirely new classes of molecules, including hollow molecules shaped like cages that contain even smaller molecules. Perhaps most intriguing of all, chemists are turning up more and more hints of how life may have originated from the carbon spawned in the explosions of supernova stars.

The 1960s and ’70s were a time of great ferment in all the sciences, and the momentum of those years has carried to the present. Among the major achievements in physics I was privileged to report were the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab—the last of six quarks predicted by theory—and the discovery in Japan that the elusive neutrino particle probably has some mass, a finding with profound implications for the fate of the universe.

Sometimes science writers watching the accelerating deluge of discoveries in physics, chemistry, molecular biology and astrophysics have actually outpaced the thinking of the scientists themselves, and science writing has bloomed as a major component of general journalism.

At The New York Times, for example, the science editor, Walter Sullivan, had been steeping himself in astrophysics for decades when in 1965 two scientists at Bell Labs, Dr. Arno A. Penzias and Dr. Robert W. Wilson, accidentally discovered a faint microwave radio signal coming from all directions in the sky. It was the first hard evidence that the universe had begun with a “Big Bang.”

Dr. Penzias later paid Mr. Sullivan one of the warmest compliments ever given a science writer, after reading an article expanding on the implications of the discovery: “Only after reading Sullivan’s story in The New York Times,” Dr. Penzias said, “did we fully understand what we had done.” In 1978 Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, their discovery having radically changed man’s view of the cosmos, were awarded a Nobel prize.

The raw material used in news coverage of important discoveries is often rather skimpy…. It is up to the science writer to judge the significance of the findings and place them in context.

This means that a science writer must be a perpetual student.

News stories about astronomy frequently have to do with black holes, for example, and for many astronomy fans it is enough to know that black holes suck in everything near them and won’t let anything—even light—escape. But to understand black holes at a deeper level requires familiarity with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and some of the greatest minds in physics are still puzzling over some of relativity’s implications.

The presumably lesser mind of the science writer has an even harder row to hoe than that of the scientist. But try, he or she must.

Curiously, as science floods the world with discoveries of variable quality—unhappily, the overwhelming majority of scientific papers fall into the category of junk science—the task of the writer seems to grow easier in some ways.

The science itself gets harder all the time, of course. The professional journals on which scientists (and writers) heavily depend are not easy to read, and they seem more difficult each year. To give some idea: several years ago the editor of a prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters, found it necessary to decree that at least the first couple of paragraphs of each published paper should be intelligible to an average PhD physicist not specializing in the subject of the paper.

But no discovery occurs in a vacuum, a fact that has helped many science writers find their way through the fog. Newton, the discoverer of much that is essential to modern physics and mathematics, wrote that he could not have seen so far without having stood on the shoulders of giants. In a small way, the science writer can also stand on the shoulders of giants. Most discoveries are incremental steps, and if a writer comes to terms with the earlier steps, new findings generally slide into an intelligible context.

The science writer also lives in dread of losing readers’ interest, which happens all too often. For instance, it’s hard to persuade a reader (or editor) to take seriously some gigantic experiment that produced only a null result. So the writer is obliged to point out that null results can have far-reaching scientific importance. The failure of an experiment by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley a century ago to detect the earth’s passage through a hypothetical universal “ether” lent powerful support to relativity theory. Scientists will soon begin a quest for gravity waves in a strikingly similar experiment, and any writer unfamiliar with Dr. Michelson and Dr. Morley’s work will have trouble reporting the story….

One trick of the trade is the use of analogy to convey the flavor of an idea, discovery or equation. But effective though analogies may be, they are never exactly appropriate and sometimes are downright wrong. It’s probably OK to call a proton a “beanbag” containing three quarks, but to call a proton accelerator an “atom smasher” makes physicists squirm.

Practice may not make perfect, but a science writer who stays in the game long enough is bound to get better. Unfortunately, it can happen that both the writer and reader may miss the significance of a scientific development; it is like being knocked down by a strong opponent.

Paul Gallico, a renowned sports writer in the 1930s, relished such encounters. Before writing about one of the boxing matches he covered, Mr. Gallico went into the ring with Jack Dempsey, who knocked him down. This, Mr. Gallico said, taught him all he needed to know about being hit, and that rich experience helped flavor his coverage.

Science writers and their readers sometimes get knocked down by hard ideas rather than by hard gloves. But the experience of grappling with such things as the fiendish mathematics of superstring theory or the complicated tactics of the AIDS virus is its own reward, even at the cost of some bumps.

—February 27, 2000

Colors Are Truly Brilliant in Trek Up Mount Metaphor

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Hovering above the ghoulish terrain, a visitor might feel transported to a distant planet. Rendered in black and white, the lay of the land would seem comfortably familiar: clusters of low, rounded foothills give way to higher, rougher ones, finally converging on majestic snowcapped peaks.

But the colors are all wrong. The alpine forests are a sickly chartreuse. The glaciers and snowfields are yellow at the bottom, orange in the middle, blood-red at the top. Elsewhere, a single peak, ascending through shades of bright yellow, fluorescent green and icy blue, juts above the crimson badlands like an obscenely protuberant Matterhorn.

Confronted with these images, which appeared in the journal Science, one might think they were digital photographs sent across space from a Viking or a Voyager, an exercise in extraterrestrial cartography.

But the territory exists only in the realm of abstraction, as arrangements of data in two experiments that have nothing to do with outer space. One involves genetics, the other quantum physics. In each, scientists are trying to get a better feel for their data by imagining it as a mathematical mountain range—one of the most dominant metaphors in science.

Explaining the strange in terms of the familiar—that is the essence of the scientific quest. In every field, from molecular biology to cosmology, data are sorted and analyzed mathematically. But in the end, the gray numbers are often translated into colorful three-dimensional pictures, the language human brains comprehend best. Using metaphor and analogy, the tools of artists and poets, abstract patterns take on substance and become lodged more firmly in the mind.

For many people, a “mountain of data” evokes a heaping pile of unorganized information. But in science, the phrase can mean data arranged with exquisite precision. Following a trend in the numbers becomes an ascent along a ridgeline leading to a rocky precipice and a stunning view over an expansive valley.

The first landscape, what scientists call a gene expression map, depicts the functioning of the genome of the worm C. elegans. Understanding how its DNA operates can lead to insights about the human genome, a biochemical structure commonly thought of as a map, a blueprint, an enciphered text or, more recently, as cellular software, the operating system for the cell.

Adopting instead the montane metaphor, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine distilled data from 553 experiments performed by 30 laboratories into an image they hoped would give an intuitive feel for how the worm’s 19,000-plus genes interact. (The work, drawing on the computational talents of Stanford Medical Informatics and Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, was published in the Sept. 14 issue of Science.)

Each of the 44 mountains represents a group of genes that, though scattered throughout the worm’s genome, become active under the same conditions, producing proteins that various cells need to conduct their affairs. (The significance of 14 of the peaks remains unknown, terra incognita.) The higher the mountain, the more genes it represents, ranging from the towering Mount Zero, a dizzying 2,703 genes high, down to Mount 43, a lowly hillock of five genes. As on a relief map, the arbitrary colors help the eye get a quick fix on the topography.

Though similar in contour, the second image, which appeared on the cover of Science in 1995, represents not genes but molecules of a substance called rubidium used in research that won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Here the altitude of the mountain indicates how fast the molecules are moving, with speed decreasing as the eye ascends into the chilly heights. The colors represent the number of atoms moving at each velocity, red being the fewest and white the most.

At the peak, most of the atoms are frozen near absolute zero, converging into a single superatom called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this exotic substance, the rules of quantum mechanics allow thousands of atoms to crowd into the same place at the same time—resulting in a new state of matter.

Like pictures in National Geographic, the most arresting scientific images inspire feelings of wanderlust, a desire to lose oneself in a far-off land. A depiction of the data showing how high-speed laser pulses were used to manipulate the spins of electrons in a substance called zinc cadmium selenide becomes an eerily symmetrical iceberg, casting its lonely reflection in a frigid, impossibly still pond. The research by physicists at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Penn State University, earned the cover spot of the June 29 issue of Science.

High-speed computers and sophisticated “data mining” software are producing increasingly refined visualizations. But the practice of bringing substance to abstractions with pictures and analogies is as old as science itself.

An individual electron is an evanescent entity, acting something like a particle and something like a wave. Really it is neither, hovering in a metaphorical territory in between. But when electrons move en masse as electricity through a wire, they can be pictured as a liquid. Current, or amperage, becomes equivalent to the rate of flow, and voltage to the pressure in the “pipes.”

The metaphor has its limits. Cut a wire and you won’t get wet, any more than you’ll freeze on top of Gene Mountain. But the analogy helps the mind get a more visceral grip.

The sophisticated procedure used to make thousands of atoms sit still long enough to merge into a Bose-Einstein condensate can be precisely described with mathematics. But it is much more evocative, with a bit of poetic license, to call it “optical cooling.” Heat is defined, after all, as the random movement of atoms. So ambush each atom, hitting it from every direction with photon guns shooting tiny projectiles of light—striking it this way and that way until it is almost stationary. The resulting glob of slow-motion matter is called optical molasses.

Metaphors are always inexact; in the quantum realm they are stretched to the breaking point. Physicists talk about a subatomic particle’s “spin.” Like a top, a particle can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. But take the analogy too far and it crumbles. An ordinary top can revolve faster or slower across a smooth range of speeds. Particles, being quantum in nature, can spin only at certain fixed velocities, preset by nature. And they can spin in various combinations—43 percent clockwise and 57 percent counterclockwise, for example—at the same time.

Less tangible still is a quality called isotopic spin. The nuclei of atoms are built from Janus-faced particles called nucleons. If a nucleon’s “isospin” is counterclockwise, it acts as a positively charged proton; reverse the direction and it becomes a chargeless neutron. But these pirouettes take place in a purely mathematical realm, an artificial space whose dimensions have nothing to do with height, width or length.

Space itself has become a metaphor. Think of cyberspace, which can be explored but not measured, or the “desktop” of your personal computer, a simulated expanse across which you “drag” folders and icons. The motion is illusory. All your mouse strokes are really doing is rapidly switching pixels on and off.

You can construct your own “restaurant space” describing the dining in your neighborhood. Categorize them according to three parameters—price, quality and years in business—and plot the information on a three-dimensional graph. Each restaurant becomes a point in an abstract space in which nearness is a measure of similarity. Two adjacent establishments might be blocks apart in the physical world.

There is no need to stop with three dimensions. Imagine another axis measuring the number of tables and another measuring the variety of wines in the cellar. Now you have a five-dimensional “hyperspace,” impossible to really picture but something that scientists use all the time.

It is not always clear whether a space is real or artificial. Super string theory holds that the particles making up matter and energy are secondary manifestations—epiphenomena—generated by tiny objects called strings and branes vibrating in a space of 10 dimensions. The theory is enormously successful on paper, but a question, perhaps unanswerable, lingers: are these extra dimensions physical or mental, like restaurant space?

Sometimes metaphors are outgrown. The biggest break in the Human Genome Project actually came half a century ago, when scientists realized that DNA could be thought of as a text, the chemical letters spelling out instructions for making and operating cells. But you can take a metaphor only so far. As experiments reveal how dynamic the genome is, with genes switching each other on and off, it begins to seem like a text that can read and edit itself—less like a book than a computer. But is DNA software or hardware? It is a little of each. As with wave/particle duality, neither metaphor exactly fits.

As the discoveries of science become part of popular culture, the metaphorical flow sometimes goes the other way. Novelists look to science for linguistic lenses to cast the familiar in a new light. The patterns of circuitry on a computer chip are commonly compared with the layout of a modern city. In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon turned the tables, comparing a sterile, overly planned Southern California community (called San Narciso) to a computer chip. In his best-known novel, the parabolic arc of a missile is memorably called “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a metaphor that seems especially apt if you remember a little college calculus.

In Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, The Corrections, Arthur Lambert, a retired engineer, sits in his basement gloomily testing Christmas lights, only to discover in the depths of the tangle a blacked-out string of bulbs. A “substantia nigra,” Mr. Franzen calls it.

The metaphor, if a little obscure, is pitch perfect. The substantia nigra (“black substance”) is a region deep in the brain that produces the neurotransmitter dopamine. In a Pynchonian flip, electrical circuits are compared to neural circuits instead of the other way around. But the analogy cuts deeper. A burned-out substantia nigra is a symptom of Parkinsonism, the disease that afflicts Arthur. He is no more able to repair the Christmas lights than his doctors are able to fix his brain.

In another scene, visitors to a chic new restaurant, distinguished by its postindustrial design, sit inside a “glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow.” Cherenkov radiation, produced by rapidly moving charged particles, is responsible for the eerie luminescence in pools of water shielding nuclear reactors.

And here is how the novel describes the neurotic dependence Arthur’s son Chip has developed on his sister, because of all the money he owes her: “He’d lived with the affliction of this debt until it had assumed the character of a neuroblastoma so intricately implicated in his cerebral architecture that he doubted he could survive its removal.”

By daring to use such allusions, Mr. Franzen compliments his readers. Novels like his are a reminder that in literature, as well as science, illuminating the intangible with a good metaphor is a powerful art.

—December 25, 2001

The Birth of Science Times: A Surprise, but No Accident

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Twenty-five years ago, editors of The New York Times had a big problem: what to do about Tuesdays?

In a bold move to draw more readers and advertising revenue in a troubled economy, the newspaper was reinventing itself in format and content. The pages were redesigned to be six columns, instead of eight, giving the paper a more spacious look. But the most striking change was abandoning the two-section daily newspaper for one in four sections Monday through Friday.

A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor and soon to be executive editor, asked Arthur Gelb, an assistant managing editor, to oversee the transformation, beginning in 1976. The first section continued to run foreign and national news, and the second, metropolitan news. The fourth section featured expanded coverage of business and financial news. The third section, it was decided, would be different each day of the week, though the specifics were left to fall into place over the next two years.

In his new memoir, City Room, Mr. Gelb writes that “virtually every executive by now viewed the forthcoming four-part paper as the lifeboat that would rescue The Times and secure its future.”

The first of the new third sections was Weekend, devoted to the arts and entertainment events every Friday, starting in April 1976. This was followed in slow but steady progression by the introduction of Living on Wednesdays (dining, cooking and personal health), Home on Thursdays (furnishings, design and gardening) and Sports Monday, which had its debut in January 1978.

For months the third section on Tuesdays went without a theme, and no one seemed to agree on what it should be. Some on the business side of the newspaper argued for a style section that would emphasize fashion; they hoped it would attract more advertising. Abe Rosenthal resisted. He wanted something more serious.

“I felt if we put in a fashion section, it would tip the balance of the paper in its quality,” Mr. Rosenthal recalled last week. “We had a lot of consumer stuff by then, and that was enough.”

Colleagues said Mr. Rosenthal had become especially sensitive to outside criticism that with some of the new sections, The Times was going soft.

Talking over ideas with associates in the late summer of 1978, Mr. Rosenthal decided, as he now says, that a section of news and features about science and medicine would have “more strength and dignity.” He made his case to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. “Punch was a very cooperative guy,” he said, “and so we did it.”

By this time, the newspaper was shut down by an 88-day strike of the pressmen. Mr. Gelb, working with Louis Silverstein, the assistant managing editor in charge of the art department, began shaping the concept and look of the new section. As editor of the science staff then, I joined in planning the types of articles and columns the section would carry. All the writers eagerly pitched in with ideas, sharing in the creation of Science Times.

In choosing science as the focus of the Tuesday section, The Times was dealing from strength. The newspaper had a long tradition of treating science as a dynamic part of modern culture. By this time, its staff of 10 science and medical reporters was the largest and most authoritative of any paper in the country. (Now the full-time science staff numbers five editors and 16 reporters, an art director, a graphics editor and a picture editor.)

For several years, the science staff had been moving beyond the daily fare of research news to write more comprehensive articles putting scientific advances in perspective and portraying scientists at their work. They were a taste of things to come.

The first issue of Science Times appeared on Nov. 14, 1978, shortly after the strike ended. In no time, the section was a hit. Teachers assigned it to classes, and doctors and scientists were impressed. Readership rose on Tuesdays, and to the surprise and delight of management, the section turned a profit with the eventual outpouring of advertising for personal computers.

Articles in Science Times won Pulitzer Prizes for two staff members. Among the other honors was a 2000 Lasker Foundation award to Science Times “for sustained, comprehensive and high-quality coverage about science, disease and human health.”

Other newspapers responded with the sincerest form of praise: they started their own regular page or pages of science news.

A case can be made that Science Times was a significant step in communicating the work of science to the larger public, and to other scientists.

It was making a statement that science should be part of the well-informed person’s regular reading diet. It was also saying to fellow journalists everywhere that science is news and that the responsible way to cover such a subject is to move beyond piecemeal reporting to more comprehensive and reflective articles that place new research in its broader context.

—November 11, 2003

Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANG

When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women’s lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point?

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women—in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.

“We can’t get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are,” said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. “The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance.”

For example, neuroscientists have shown that women’s brains are about 10 percent smaller than men’s, on average, even after accounting for women’s comparatively smaller body size.

But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time.

A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women—closer in size to gorillas’, he said—and said that explained the “fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason” in women.

Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter—the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain’s thinking—while men’s brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons.

To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Irvine, suggest that men and women with equal I.Q. scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests.

Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder.

What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone’s conjecture.

“It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition,” argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When they do study sheer cognitive prowess, many researchers have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks.

“We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they’re remarkably alike,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging from five months through seven years.

“In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together,” Dr. Spelke said. “But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them.”

In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so.

Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences.

But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of “uncertainty,” which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher overall than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. “We have no idea why this should be so,” said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland.

Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math.

The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.

Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SATs in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men’s greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists.

For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear.

Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. “Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with,” she said.

And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. “The SATs turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance,” she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious.

Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them “Daddy truck” and “baby truck.”

But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans.

Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work.

Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder.

“There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice,” Dr. Xie said, “is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans.”

In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology.

Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke “innate differences” to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism?

C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science.

Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people—half men, half women—rated identical academic papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was “John T. McKay” than when the author was “Joan T. McKay.” There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.

Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, “It’s hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way.”

A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job—one with more education, the other with more work experience—they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.

The debate is sure to go on.

Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women’s careers in the sciences.

“People have to have an open mind,” Dr. Witelson said.

—January 24, 2005

Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science

By CORNELIA DEAN

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: “Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. “No!” declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, “this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race.”

But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today, as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.

“It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific circles,” said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith.

Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional—capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation. This belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force.

Their belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people.

Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, “nonoverlapping magisteria,” as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book Rocks of Ages (Ballantine, 1999). In Dr. Gould’s view, science speaks with authority in the realm of “what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)” and religion holds sway over “questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.”

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores of scientists crowded into a room to hear it.

Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe scientists’ moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world.

One panelist, Dr. Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said scientists, like other people, were guided by their own human purposes, meaning and values. The idea that fact can be separated from values and meaning “jibes poorly with what we know of the history of science,” Dr. Efron said.

Dr. Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, also believes that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and scientific theories strictly separate. “I don’t find it very satisfactory and I don’t find it very necessary,” he said in an interview. He noted that until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. “Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature,” he said.

But he acknowledged that as head of the American government’s efforts to decipher the human genetic code, he had a leading role in work that many say definitively demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory to explain the complexity and abundance of life.

As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms, even bacteria, the similarities “are absolutely compelling,” Dr. Collins said. “If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love God—what a horrible choice.”

Dr. Collins was a nonbeliever until he was 27—“more and more into the mode of being not only agnostic but being an atheist,” as he put it. All that changed after he completed his doctorate in physics and was at work on his medical degree, when he was among those treating a woman dying of heart disease. “She was very clear about her faith and she looked me square in the eye and she said, ‘what do you believe?’” he recalled. “I sort of stammered out, ‘I am not sure.’”

He said he realized then that he had never considered the matter seriously, the way a scientist should. He began reading about various religious beliefs, which only confused him. Finally, a Methodist minister gave him a book, Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. In the book Lewis, an atheist until he was a grown man, argues that the idea of right and wrong is universal among people, a moral law they “did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try.” This universal feeling, he said, is evidence for the plausibility of God.

When he read the book, Dr. Collins said, “I thought, my gosh, this guy is me.”

Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination, but he is a Christian. Colleagues sometimes express surprise at his faith, he said. “They’ll say, ’how can you believe that? Did you check your brain at the door?” But he said he had discovered in talking to students and colleagues that “there is a great deal of interest in this topic.”

Polling Scientists on Beliefs

According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God—and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray “in expectation of receiving an answer.”

The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists.

Others play down those results. They note that when Dr. Larson put part of the same survey to “leading scientists”—in this case, members of the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s most eminent scientific organization—fewer than 10 percent professed belief in a personal God or human immortality.

This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he could understand why religious people would believe that anything that eroded belief was destructive. But he added: “I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That’s a good thing.”

No God, No Moral Compass?

He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. “We know how many mistakes we’ve made,” Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass.

In any event, he added, “the experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant,” he said. “Most scientists I know simply don’t think about it very much. They don’t think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.”

Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in “a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening.”

Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown, said his students were often surprised to find that he was religious, especially when they realized that his faith was not some sort of vague theism but observant Roman Catholicism.

Dr. Miller, whose book, Finding Darwin’s God, explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with his religious faith, said he was usually challenged in his biology classes by one or two students whose religions did not accept evolution, who asked how important the theory would be in the course.

“What they are really asking me is “do I have to believe in this stuff to get an A?,”’ he said. He says he tells them that “belief is never an issue in science.”

“I don’t care if you believe in the Krebs cycle,” he said, referring to the process by which energy is utilized in the cell. “I just want you to know what it is and how it works. My feeling about evolution is the same thing.”

For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. “Faith is one thing, what you believe from the heart,” said Joseph E. Murray, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation. But in scientific research, he said, “it’s the results that count.”

Dr. Murray, who describes himself as “a cradle Catholic” who has rarely missed weekly Mass and who prays every morning, said that when he was preparing for the first ever human organ transplant, a kidney that a young man had donated to his identical twin, he and his colleagues consulted a number of religious leaders about whether they were doing the right thing. “It seemed natural,” he said.

Using Every Tool

“When you are searching for truth you should use every possible avenue, including revelation,” said Dr. Murray, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy, which advises the Vatican on scientific issues, and who described the influence of his faith on his work in his memoir, Surgery of the Soul (Science History Publications, 2002).

Since his appearance at the City College panel, when he was dismayed by the tepid reception received by his remarks on the incompatibility of good science and religious belief, Dr. Hauptman said he had been discussing the issue with colleagues in Buffalo, where he is president of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

“I think almost without exception the people I have spoken to are scientists and they do believe in the existence of a supreme being,” he said. “If you ask me to explain it—I cannot explain it at all.”

But Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, said that even scientists who were believers did not claim evidence for that belief. “The most they will claim is that there is no evidence against,” Dr. Dawkins said, “which is pathetically weak. There is no evidence against all sorts of things, but we don’t waste our time believing in them.”

Dr. Collins said he believed that some scientists were unwilling to profess faith in public “because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don’t have any need of action of the supernatural sort,” or because of pride in the idea that science is the ultimate source of intellectual meaning.

But he said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to confront the big questions religion tried to answer. “You will never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation,” he said. “You won’t understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions—and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?”

—August 23, 2005

A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform

By CARL ZIMMER

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers.

It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”

The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,” said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem—“a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

“This is a tremendous threat,” he said.

Last month, in a pair of editorials in Infection and Immunity, the two editors issued a plea for fundamental reforms. They also presented their concerns at the March 27 meeting of the National Academies of Sciences committee on science, technology and the law.

Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”

No one claims that science was ever free of misconduct or bad research. Indeed, the scientific method itself is intended to overcome mistakes and misdeeds. When scientists make a new discovery, others review the research skeptically before it is published. And once it is, the scientific community can try to replicate the results to see if they hold up.

But critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades—especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.

In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 the Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes.

Several factors are at play here, scientists say. One may be that because journals are now online, bad papers are simply reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be spotted. “You can sit at your laptop and pull a lot of different papers together,” Dr. Fang said.

But other forces are more pernicious. To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get there.

To measure this claim, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.

The highest “retraction index” in the study went to one of the world’s leading medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine. In a statement for this article, it questioned the study’s methodology, noting that it considered only papers with abstracts, which are included in a small fraction of studies published in each issue. “Because our denominator was low, the index was high,” the statement said.

Monica M. Bradford, executive editor of the journal Science, suggested that the extra attention high-impact journals get might be part of the reason for their higher rate of retraction. “Papers making the most dramatic advances will be subject to the most scrutiny,” she said.

Dr. Fang says that may well be true, but adds that it cuts both ways—that the scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of PhD’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a PhD. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.

Yet labs continue to have an incentive to take on lots of graduate students to produce more research. “I refer to it as a pyramid scheme,” said Paula Stephan, a Georgia State University economist and author of How Economics Shapes Science, published in January by Harvard University Press.

In such an environment, a high-profile paper can mean the difference between a career in science or leaving the field. “It’s becoming the price of admission,” Dr. Fang said.

The scramble isn’t over once young scientists get a job. “Everyone feels nervous even when they’re successful,” he continued. “They ask, ‘Will this be the beginning of the decline?’”

University laboratories count on a steady stream of grants from the government and other sources. The National Institutes of Health accepts a much lower percentage of grant applications today than in earlier decades. At the same time, many universities expect scientists to draw an increasing part of their salaries from grants, and these pressures have influenced how scientists are promoted.

“What people do is they count papers, and they look at the prestige of the journal in which the research is published, and they see how may grant dollars scientists have, and if they don’t have funding, they don’t get promoted,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s not about the quality of the research.”

Dr. Ness likens scientists today to small-business owners, rather than people trying to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. “You’re marketing and selling to other scientists,” she said. “To the degree you can market and sell your products better, you’re creating the revenue stream to fund your enterprise.”

Universities want to attract successful scientists, and so they have erected a glut of science buildings, Dr. Stephan said. Some universities have gone into debt, betting that the flow of grant money will eventually pay off the loans. “It’s really going to bite them,” she said.

With all this pressure on scientists, they may lack the extra time to check their own research—to figure out why some of their data doesn’t fit their hypothesis, for example. Instead, they have to be concerned about publishing papers before someone else publishes the same results.

“You can’t afford to fail, to have your hypothesis disproven,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s a small minority of scientists who engage in frank misconduct. It’s a much more insidious thing that you feel compelled to put the best face on everything.”

Adding to the pressure, thousands of new Ph.D. scientists are coming out of countries like China and India. Writing in the April 5 issue of Nature, Dr. Stephan points out that a number of countries—including China, South Korea and Turkey—now offer cash rewards to scientists who get papers into high-profile journals. She has found these incentives set off a flood of extra papers submitted to those journals, with few actually being published in them. “It clearly burdens the system,” she said.

To change the system, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall say, start by giving graduate students a better understanding of science’s ground rules—what Dr. Casadevall calls “the science of how you know what you know.”

They would also move away from the winner-take-all system, in which grants are concentrated among a small fraction of scientists. One way to do that may be to put a cap on the grants any one lab can receive.

Such a shift would require scientists to surrender some of their most cherished practices—the priority rule, for example, which gives all the credit for a scientific discovery to whoever publishes results first. (Three centuries ago, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were bickering about who invented calculus.) Dr. Casadevall thinks it leads to rival research teams’ obsessing over secrecy, and rushing out their papers to beat their competitors. “And that can’t be good,” he said.

To ease such cutthroat competition, the two editors would also change the rules for scientific prizes and would have universities take collaboration into account when they decide on promotions.

Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard.

But Dr. Fang worries that the situation could become much more dire if nothing happens soon. “When our generation goes away, where is the new generation going to be?” he asked. “All the scientists I know are so anxious about their funding that they don’t make inspiring role models. I heard it from my own kids, who went into art and music respectively. They said, ‘You know, we see you, and you don’t look very happy.’”

—April 17, 2012