Lab Rat

I’ve written a lot about human metabolism over the years, particularly the biological forces and personal choices that make it speed up or slow down. That led me to studies from Eric Poehlman, which I may not have cited directly but usually at least considered before I completed whatever it was I was working on.

So when Poehlman was exposed as one of the most audacious frauds in U.S. academic history a year and a half ago, I was caught off guard, as I wrote here.

Now the New York Times Magazine has a long feature on the student who first exposed Poehlman.

It starts with lab technician Walter DeNiro’s suspicions about data that mysteriously morphs from disproving one of Poehlman’s theses to supporting it. Then he looks more deeply into the problem:

DeNino spent the next several evenings combing through hundreds of patients’ records in the lab and university hospital, trying to verify the data contained in Poehlman’s spreadsheets. Each night was worse than the one before. He discovered not only reversed data points, but also figures for measurements that had never been taken and even patients who appeared not to exist at all. In the mornings he would return to the lab and continue working as Poehlman’s technician, waiting for the right moment to confront the principal investigator.

The scientific process is meant to be self-correcting. Peer review of scientific journals and the ability of scientists to replicate one another’s results are supposed to weed out erroneous conclusions and preserve the integrity of the scientific record over time. But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust — and the self-interest — of his or her junior colleagues.

The principal investigator in a lab has the power to jump-start careers. By writing papers with graduate students and postdocs and using connections to help obtain fellowships and appointments, senior scientists can help their lab workers secure coveted tenure-track jobs. They can also do damage by withholding this support.

The entire story by Jeneen Interlandi is terrific, but for me this is the money passage:

The length of time that Poehlman perpetrated his fraud — 10 years — and its scope make his case unique, even among the most egregious examples of scientific misconduct. Some scientists believe that his ability to beat the system for so long had as much to do with the research topics he chose as with his aggressive tactics. His work was prominent, but none of his studies broke new scientific ground. (This may also be why no other scientists working in the field have retracted papers as a result of Poehlman’s fraud.) By testing undisputed assumptions on popular topics, Poehlman attracted enough attention to maintain his status but not enough to invite suspicion. Moreover, replicating his longitudinal data would be expensive and difficult to do.

“Eric excelled at telling us what we wanted to hear,” Matthews, Poehlman’s former colleague, told me. “He published results that confirmed our predisposed hypotheses.” Steven Heymsfield, an obesity researcher at Merck Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey, echoed Matthews’s sentiments and added that Poehlman’s success owed more to his business sense and charisma than to his aptitude as a scientist.

“In effect, he was a successful entrepreneur and not a brilliant thinker with revolutionary ideas,” Heymsfield wrote me via e-mail. “But deans love people who bring in money and recognition to universities, so there is Eric.”

If I were to create a unified theory of fraud, that would be it — no matter if it’s science, politics, or journalism, you get away with it by telling people what they want to hear. You do it with style, you alternately charm and bully the people around you, and you do it so convincingly that eventually you fool yourself into believing your own B.S.

That’s certainly how the biggest journalistic frauds have gotten away with what they did. Stephen Glass, for example, wrote about a convention of young Republicans in which more than 3,000 Monica Lewinsky-related items were for sale, and computer hackers who become so famous they have agents. Those things weren’t true, but they were based on ideas most of us were willing to believe were true.

And in politics … well, no one wants me to go there. But I will note another reference from the New York Times Magazine, which I blogged about here. It was a story by Matt Bai on why Hollywood liberals were so out of step with East Coast liberals in the run-up to the Iraq war. I quoted this passage:

Hollywood quickly grasped realities about the war that Washington, for all its gravity and accumulated sagacity, did not. From the moment the administration began making its case for invasion in the summer of 2002, most partisans and journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election, that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented. This explains, in large part, why a lot of Congressional Democrats with years of foreign policy experience supported the invasion. To them, the notion that an American secretary of state — let alone the venerable Colin Powell — would come before the United Nations Security Council and level fabricated charges, even unwittingly, seemed incredible and even paranoid.

To Hollywood, however, such a story not only seemed credible but also entirely likely. These are people, after all, who flourish in a world of make-believe, who understand the raw persuasive power of narrative arc, moral dilemma and dramatic revelation. They were willing to accept — in fact, they recognized almost viscerally — that the president’s story about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was too richly timed and too tightly wrapped, and they understood that once a storyteller began to tinker with facts, there was no end to the scenarios he might invent that he might dubiously claim to be “based on a true story.” Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation.

That’s how you recognize fraud of any kind: When facts are too perfectly aligned with the intended audience’s preconceived notions, you have to at least suspect something’s up. And it’s usually people who’re out of the loop who discover it. Stephen Glass wasn’t brought down by his colleagues at The New Republic; it was rival journalists at Forbes Digital Tool, guys who specialized in reporting on technology, who first realized he’d made up the story about the hackers.

Similarly, it was a group of rival image-makers in Hollywood who were among the first to recognize that the image-makers in Washington were creating fiction and labeling it as truth.

My thesis isn’t perfect; Poehlman wasn’t brought down by rival researchers, but by one of his own assistants, a guy who genuinely liked and was liked by his mentor.

But if I just fudge a few details, and turn the whistleblower into someone who was jealous of Poehlman’s success, it’ll fit right into my preconceived notion of how fraud is exposed. And chances are I’d get away with it, since it’s what we all want to believe in the first place.

Tags: Tags: science