If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

 Thomas Frank in The Guardian

‘My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month.’ Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
 

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

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I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties. 

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

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“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Our job as scientists is to find the truth. But we must also be storytellers

Nick Enfield in The Guardian

Scientists often struggle to communicate the findings of research. Our subject matter can be technical and not easily digested by a general audience. And our discoveries – from a new type of tessellating pentagon to the presence of gravitational waves in space – have no meaning until that meaning can be defined and agreed upon. To address this, we are often advised to use the tools of narrative.

This advice is now found everywhere from training sessions to blogs to the most prominent scientific journals. An article in Nature magazine advises scientists to relate data to the world by using “the age-old custom of telling a story.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences cites the “increased comprehension, interest, and engagement” that narrative offers. And another study shows that writing in a narrative style increases uptake of scientific results.

What is a story? Here is screenwriting guru John Truby’s definition: “A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.” This is every Hollywood film. At the centre is a person with a well-defined goal. They pursue that goal, against the odds, and after various twists and turns the story comes to a satisfying end. Most importantly, as writer John Collee explains, a good story will have a meaning, a relatable moral with universal resonance for audiences.

How can scientists be expected to use storytelling when we are not trained in the craft? True, we are not professional screenwriters. But like everyone we are nevertheless well-practiced storytellers. When you tell someone about a frightening incident that happened on the bus to work, your narrative may be ordinary but it has the core elements of story: situation, complication, resolution, and most importantly, meaning. You are not just telling me what happened, you are telling me what it means to you, how you feel about it. And you are inviting me to feel the same. In this way, stories are one of our most important social bonding mechanisms.

So, what could be wrong with urging scientists to take advantage of our natural storytelling skills? In an article titled “Against storytelling of scientific results”, Yarden Katz explains that certain defining features of narrative – someone pursing a goal; a satisfying resolution that resolves this; a meaning that draws people in – are antithetical to key ideals and practices of scientific work.


Human beings, scientists included, have brains that are not evolved for dispassionate thinking

One objection is that, according to the scientific norm known as disinterestedness, scientists should not aim for any particular result. Our job is to find the truth. So, we should first establish the facts, and then use those facts to decide what our conclusions are. But too often, people have it the wrong way around. We start with our pre-established beliefs, and then look for evidence to support them. Another objection is that because science is a permanently unfinished line of business, there can be no satisfying endings.

Further, the scientist’s job is to inform, not persuade. Advice in Nature from authors Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo seems to challenge this norm: “Maintain focus of your presentation by leaving out detail that does not advance the plot”; “inviting readers to draw their own conclusions is risky.” Most scientists would agree that this is going too far.

Katz’s concerns are well taken. But what should be done? Can we be truly dispassionate about what we are doing in science? There are reasons to think that even when we are operating in the rarefied atmosphere of scientific endeavor, we are never not wrapping our lives in stories.

Human beings, scientists included, have brains that are not evolved for dispassionate thinking. Bugs in our reasoning from the confirmation bias to the gambler’s fallacy make our natural thought processes deeply subjective and partial. And these are precisely the kinds of cognitive propensities that make storytelling stick so well. Even if an exemplary scientist has trained herself to be utterly objective, her audience will always bring their biased, story-gobbling minds.

This is why we have little choice but to apply the philosophy of judo to the problem of communicating scientific work and findings. Rather than struggle against cognitive biases, we need to work with them if we are going to keep them in check. Facts can be collected but they need to be interpreted. To interpret a fact is to give it meaning. And this is nothing other than storytelling. Only with a story can the facts be communicated, and only then can they become part of the received knowledge that drives the very possibility of scientific progress.

Scientists do not have the luxury of forgoing storytelling. We need not fear that storytelling will compromise our objectivity. If we believe that we have the right story, then we should tell it. Only then can it be evaluated. Because science is a collective enterprise, our stories will succeed when they are validated by broad agreement in our community.

It is our responsibility to become at least literate, if not masterly, in storytelling about our work. Our audiences need stories. So we must tell the right stories about our findings, if we are going to treat those findings with the respect they need.

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

Stephen Buranyi in The Guardian


In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Scientists are well aware that they seem to be getting a bad deal. The publishing business is “perverse and needless”, the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 article for the Guardian, declaring that it “should be a public scandal”. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists “are all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control of those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly inflated price?” (A representative of RELX Group, the official name of Elsevier since 2015, told me that it and other publishers “serve the research community by doing things that they need that they either cannot, or do not do on their own, and charge a fair price for that service”.)

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications. A 2013 study, for example, reported that half of all clinical trials in the US are never published in a journal.

According to critics, the journal system actually holds back scientific progress. In a 2008 essay, Dr Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds and conducts medical research for the US government, argued that, given the importance of scientific innovation to society, “there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated”.

Aspesi, after talking to a network of more than 25 prominent scientists and activists, had come to believe the tide was about to turn against the industry that Elsevier led. More and more research libraries, which purchase journals for universities, were claiming that their budgets were exhausted by decades of price increases, and were threatening to cancel their multi-million-pound subscription packages unless Elsevier dropped its prices. State organisations such as the American NIH and the German Research Foundation (DFG) had recently committed to making their research available through free online journals, and Aspesi believed that governments might step in and ensure that all publicly funded research would be available for free, to anyone. Elsevier and its competitors would be caught in a perfect storm, with their customers revolting from below, and government regulation looming above.

In March 2011, Aspesi published a report recommending that his clients sell Elsevier stock. A few months later, in a conference call between Elsevier management and investment firms, he pressed the CEO of Elsevier, Erik Engstrom, about the deteriorating relationship with the libraries. He asked what was wrong with the business if “your customers are so desperate”. Engstrom dodged the question. Over the next two weeks, Elsevier stock tumbled by more than 20%, losing £1bn in value. The problems Aspesi saw were deep and structural, and he believed they would play out over the next half-decade – but things already seemed to be moving in the direction he had predicted.

Over the next year, however, most libraries backed down and committed to Elsevier’s contracts, and governments largely failed to push an alternative model for disseminating research. In 2012 and 2013, Elsevier posted profit margins of more than 40%. The following year, Aspesi reversed his recommendation to sell. “He listened to us too closely, and he got a bit burned,” David Prosser, the head of Research Libraries UK, and a prominent voice for reforming the publishing industry, told me recently. Elsevier was here to stay.

Illustration: Dom McKenzie

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

Even scientists who are fighting for reform are often not aware of the roots of the system: how, in the boom years after the second world war, entrepreneurs built fortunes by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. And no one was more transformative and ingenious than Robert Maxwell, who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society. Maxwell would go on to become an MP, a press baron who challenged Rupert Murdoch, and one of the most notorious figures in British life. But his true importance was far larger than most of us realise. Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.

In 1946, the 23-year-old Robert Maxwell was working in Berlin and already had a significant reputation. Although he had grown up in a poor Czech village, he had fought for the British army during the war as part of a contingent of European exiles, winning a Military Cross and British citizenship in the process. After the war, he served as an intelligence officer in Berlin, using his nine languages to interrogate prisoners. Maxwell was tall, brash, and not at all content with his already considerable success – an acquaintance at the time recalled him confessing his greatest desire: “to be a millionaire”.

At the same time, the British government was preparing an unlikely project that would allow him to do just that. Top British scientists – from Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, to the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin – were concerned that while British science was world-class, its publishing arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being inefficient and constantly broke. Journals, which often appeared on cheap, thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies. The British Chemical Society had a months-long backlog of articles for publication, and relied on cash handouts from the Royal Society to run its printing operations.

The government’s solution was to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths (now owned by Elsevier) with the renowned German publisher Springer, to draw on the latter’s expertise. Butterworths would learn to turn a profit on journals, and British science would get its work out at a faster pace. Maxwell had already established his own business helping Springer ship scientific articles to Britain. The Butterworths directors, being ex-British intelligence themselves, hired the young Maxwell to help manage the company, and another ex-spook, Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi nuclear secrets to the British through the French and Dutch resistance, as scientific editor.

They couldn’t have begun at a better time. Science was about to enter a period of unprecedented growth, having gone from being a scattered, amateur pursuit of wealthy gentleman to a respected profession. In the postwar years, it would become a byword for progress. “Science has been in the wings. It should be brought to the centre of the stage – for in it lies much of our hope for the future,” wrote the American engineer and Manhattan Project administrator Vannevar Bush, in a 1945 report to President Harry S Truman. After the war, government emerged for the first time as the major patron of scientific endeavour, not just in the military, but through newly created agencies such as the US National Science Foundation, and the rapidly expanding university system.

When Butterworths decided to abandon the fledgling project in 1951, Maxwell offered £13,000 (about £420,000 today) for both Butterworth’s and Springer’s shares, giving him control of the company. Rosbaud stayed on as scientific director, and named the new venture Pergamon Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city of Pergamon, featuring Athena, goddess of wisdom, which they adapted for the company’s logo – a simple line drawing appropriately representing both knowledge and money.

In an environment newly flush with cash and optimism, it was Rosbaud who pioneered the method that would drive Pergamon’s success. As science expanded, he realised that it would need new journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about the boundaries of their field. Rosbaud had none of these constraints. All he needed to do was to convince a prominent academic that their particular field required a new journal to showcase it properly, and install that person at the helm of it. Pergamon would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which suddenly had a lot of government money to spend.

Maxwell was a quick study. In 1955, he and Rosbaud attended the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Maxwell rented an office near the conference and wandered into seminars and official functions offering to publish any papers the scientists had come to present, and asking them to sign exclusive contracts to edit Pergamon journals. Other publishers were shocked by his brash style. Daan Frank, of North Holland Publishing (now owned by Elsevier) would later complain that Maxwell was “dishonest” for scooping up scientists without regard for specific content.

Rosbaud, too, was reportedly put off by Maxwell’s hunger for profit. Unlike the humble former scientist, Maxwell favoured expensive suits and slicked-back hair. Having rounded his Czech accent into a formidably posh, newsreader basso, he looked and sounded precisely like the tycoon he wished to be. In 1955, Rosbaud told the Nobel prize-winning physicist Nevill Mott that the journals were his beloved little “ewe lambs”, and Maxwell was the biblical King David, who would butcher and sell them for profit. In 1956, the pair had a falling out, and Rosbaud left the company.

By then, Maxwell had taken Rosbaud’s business model and turned it into something all his own. Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs, but when Maxwell returned to the Geneva conference that year, he rented a house in nearby Collonge-Bellerive, a picturesque town on the lakeshore, where he entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. “He always said we don’t compete on sales, we compete on authors,” Albert Henderson, a former deputy director at Pergamon, told me. “We would attend conferences specifically looking to recruit editors for new journals.” There are tales of parties on the roof of the Athens Hilton, of gifts of Concorde flights, of scientists being put on a chartered boat tour of the Greek islands to plan their new journal.

By 1959, Pergamon was publishing 40 journals; six years later it would publish 150. This put Maxwell well ahead of the competition. (In 1959, Pergamon’s rival, Elsevier, had just 10 English-language journals, and it would take the company another decade to reach 50.) By 1960, Maxwell had taken to being driven in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, and moved his home and the Pergamon operation from London to the palatial Headington Hill Hall estate in Oxford, which was also home to the British book publishing house Blackwell’s.

Scientific societies, such as the British Society of Rheology, seeing the writing on the wall, even began letting Pergamon take over their journals for a small regular fee. Leslie Iversen, former editor at the Journal of Neurochemistry, recalls being wooed with lavish dinners at Maxwell’s estate. “He was very impressive, this big entrepreneur,” said Iversen. “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1959, western scientists scrambled to catch up on Russian space research, and were surprised to learn that Maxwell had already negotiated an exclusive English-language deal to publish the Russian Academy of Sciences’ journals earlier in the decade.

“He had interests in all of these places. I went to Japan, he had an American man running an office there by himself. I went to India, there was someone there,” said Ashby. And the international markets could be extremely lucrative. Ronald Suleski, who ran Pergamon’s Japanese office in the 1970s, told me that the Japanese scientific societies, desperate to get their work published in English, gave Maxwell the rights to their members’ results for free.

In a letter celebrating Pergamon’s 40th anniversary, Eiichi Kobayashi, director of Maruzen, Pergamon’s longtime Japanese distributor, recalled of Maxwell that “each time I have the pleasure of meeting him, I am reminded of F Scott Fitzgerald’s words that a millionaire is no ordinary man”.

The scientific article has essentially become the only way science is systematically represented in the world. (As Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the library of the Wellcome Trust, the world’s second-biggest private funder of biomedical research, puts it: “We spend a billion pounds a year, and we get back articles.”) It is the primary resource of our most respected realm of expertise. “Publishing is the expression of our work. A good idea, a conversation or correspondence, even from the most brilliant person in the world … doesn’t count for anything unless you have it published,” says Neal Young of the NIH. If you control access to the scientific literature, it is, to all intents and purposes, like controlling science.

Maxwell’s success was built on an insight into the nature of scientific journals that would take others years to understand and replicate. While his competitors groused about him diluting the market, Maxwell knew that there was, in fact, no limit to the market. Creating The Journal of Nuclear Energy didn’t take business away from rival publisher North Holland’s journal Nuclear Physics. Scientific articles are about unique discoveries: one article cannot substitute for another. If a serious new journal appeared, scientists would simply request that their university library subscribe to that one as well. If Maxwell was creating three times as many journals as his competition, he would make three times more money.

The only potential limit was a slow-down in government funding, but there was little sign of that happening. In the 1960s, Kennedy bankrolled the space programme, and at the outset of the 1970s Nixon declared a “war on cancer”, while at the same time the British government developed its own nuclear programme with American aid. No matter the political climate, science was buoyed by great swells of government money.

  Robert Maxwell in 1985. Photograph: Terry O'Neill/Hulton/Getty

In its early days, Pergamon had been at the centre of fierce debates about the ethics of allowing commercial interests into the supposedly disinterested and profit-shunning world of science. In a 1988 letter commemorating the 40th anniversary of Pergamon, John Coales of Cambridge University noted that initially many of his friends “considered [Maxwell] the greatest villain yet unhung”.

But by the end of the 1960s, commercial publishing was considered the status quo, and publishers were seen as a necessary partner in the advancement of science. Pergamon helped turbocharge the field’s great expansion by speeding up the publication process and presenting it in a more stylish package. Scientists’ concerns about signing away their copyright were overwhelmed by the convenience of dealing with Pergamon, the shine it gave their work, and the force of Maxwell’s personality. Scientists, it seemed, were largely happy with the wolf they had let in the door.

“He was a bully, but I quite liked him,” says Denis Noble, a physiologist at Oxford University and the editor of the journal Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology. Occasionally, Maxwell would call Noble to his house for a meeting. “Often there would be a party going on, a nice musical ensemble, there was no barrier between his work and personal life,” Noble says. Maxwell would then proceed to alternately browbeat and charm him into splitting the biannual journal into a monthly or bimonthly publication, which would lead to an attendant increase in subscription payments.

In the end, though, Maxwell would nearly always defer to the scientists’ wishes, and scientists came to appreciate his patronly persona. “I have to confess that, quickly realising his predatory and entrepreneurial ambitions, I nevertheless took a great liking to him,” Arthur Barrett, then editor of the journal Vacuum, wrote in a 1988 piece about the publication’s early years. And the feeling was mutual. Maxwell doted on his relationships with famous scientists, who were treated with uncharacteristic deference. “He realised early on that the scientists were vitally important. He would do whatever they wanted. It drove the rest of the staff crazy,” Richard Coleman, who worked in journal production at Pergamon in the late 1960s, told me. When Pergamon was the target of a hostile takeover attempt, a 1973 Guardian article reported that journal editors threatened “to desert” rather than work for another chairman.

Maxwell had transformed the business of publishing, but the day-to-day work of science remained unchanged. Scientists still largely took their work to whichever journal was the best fit for their research area – and Maxwell was happy to publish any and all research that his editors deemed sufficiently rigorous. In the mid-1970s, though, publishers began to meddle with the practice of science itself, starting down a path that would lock scientists’ careers into the publishing system, and impose the business’s own standards on the direction of research. One journal became the symbol of this transformation.

“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology. It was edited a young biologist named Ben Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.

What he created was a venue for scientific blockbusters, and scientists began shaping their work on his terms. “Lewin was clever. He realised scientists are very vain, and wanted to be part of this selective members club; Cell was ‘it’, and you had to get your paper in there,” Schekman said. “I was subject to this kind of pressure, too.” He ended up publishing some of his Nobel-cited work in Cell.

Suddenly, where you published became immensely important. Other editors took a similarly activist approach in the hopes of replicating Cell’s success. Publishers also adopted a metric called “impact factor,” invented in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield, a librarian and linguist, as a rough calculation of how often papers in a given journal are cited in other papers. For publishers, it became a way to rank and advertise the scientific reach of their products. The new-look journals, with their emphasis on big results, shot to the top of these new rankings, and scientists who published in “high-impact” journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world. (Garfield later referred to his creation as “like nuclear energy … a mixed blessing”.)

It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big influence on where science goes,” he said.

And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”

Maxwell understood the way journals were now the kingmakers of science. But his main concern was still expansion, and he still had a keen vision of where science was heading, and which new fields of study he could colonise. Richard Charkin, the former CEO of the British publisher Macmillan, who was an editor at Pergamon in 1974, recalls Maxwell waving Watson and Crick’s one-page report on the structure of DNA at an editorial meeting and declaring that the future was in life science and its multitude of tiny questions, each of which could have its own publication. “I think we launched a hundred journals that year,” Charkin said. “I mean, Jesus wept.”

Pergamon also branched into social sciences and psychology. A series of journals prefixed “Computers and” suggest that Maxwell spotted the growing importance of digital technology. “It was endless,” Peter Ashby told me. “Oxford Polytechnic [now Oxford Brookes University] started a department of hospitality with a chef. We had to go find out who the head of the department was, make him start a journal. And boom – International Journal of Hospitality Management.”

By the late 1970s, Maxwell was also dealing with a more crowded market. “I was at Oxford University Press at that time,” Charkin told me. “We sat up and said, ‘Hell, these journals make a lot of money!” Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Elsevier had begun expanding its English-language journals, absorbing the domestic competition in a series of acquisitions and growing at a rate of 35 titles a year.

As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.

Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.

From a business perspective, it was a total victory for Maxwell. Libraries were a captive market, and journals had improbably installed themselves as the gatekeepers of scientific prestige – meaning that scientists couldn’t simply abandon them if a new method of sharing results came along. “Were we not so naive, we would long ago have recognised our true position: that we are sitting on top of fat piles of money which clever people on all sides are trying to transfer on to their piles,” wrote the University of Michigan librarian Robert Houbeck in a trade journal in 1988. Three years earlier, despite scientific funding suffering its first multi-year dip in decades, Pergamon had reported a 47% profit margin.

Maxwell wouldn’t be around to tend his victorious empire. The acquisitive nature that drove Pergamon’s success also led him to make a surfeit of flashy but questionable investments, including the football teams Oxford United and Derby County FC, television stations around the world, and, in 1984, the UK’s Mirror newspaper group, where he began to spend more and more of his time. In 1991, to finance his impending purchase of the New York Daily News, Maxwell sold Pergamon to its quiet Dutch competitor Elsevier for £440m (£919m today).

Many former Pergamon employees separately told me that they knew it was all over for Maxwell when he made the Elsevier deal, because Pergamon was the company he truly loved. Later that year, he became mired in a series of scandals over his mounting debts, shady accounting practices, and an explosive accusation by the American journalist Seymour Hersh that he was an Israeli spy with links to arms traders. On 5 November 1991, Maxwell was found drowned off his yacht in the Canary Islands. The world was stunned, and by the next day the Mirror’s tabloid rival Sun was posing the question on everyone’s mind: “DID HE FALL … DID HE JUMP?”, its headline blared. (A third explanation, that he was pushed, would also come up.)

The story dominated the British press for months, with suspicion growing that Maxwell had committed suicide, after an investigation revealed that he had stolen more than £400m from the Mirror pension fund to service his debts. (In December 1991, a Spanish coroner’s report ruled the death accidental.) The speculation was endless: in 2003, the journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon published a book alleging that Maxwell was assassinated by Mossad to hide his spying activities. By that time, Maxwell was long gone, but the business he had started continued to thrive in new hands, reaching new levels of profit and global power over the coming decades.

If Maxwell’s genius was in expansion, Elsevier’s was in consolidation. With the purchase of Pergamon’s 400-strong catalogue, Elsevier now controlled more than 1,000 scientific journals, making it by far the largest scientific publisher in the world.

At the time of the merger, Charkin, the former Macmillan CEO, recalls advising Pierre Vinken, the CEO of Elsevier, that Pergamon was a mature business, and that Elsevier had overpaid for it. But Vinken had no doubts, Charkin recalled: “He said, ‘You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. That’s what happened at Pergamon. And then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.’ He was right and I was wrong.”

By 1994, three years after acquiring Pergamon, Elsevier had raised its prices by 50%. Universities complained that their budgets were stretched to breaking point – the US-based Publishers Weekly reported librarians referring to a “doomsday machine” in their industry – and, for the first time, they began cancelling subscriptions to less popular journals.

Illustration: Dom McKenzie

At the time, Elsevier’s behaviour seemed suicidal. It was angering its customers just as the internet was arriving to offer them a free alternative. A 1995 Forbes article described scientists sharing results over early web servers, and asked if Elsevier was to be “The Internet’s First Victim”. But, as always, the publishers understood the market better than the academics.

In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year – according to a report based on freedom of information requests, Cornell University’s 2009 tab was just short of $2m – and any student or professor could download any journal they wanted through Elsevier’s website. Universities signed up en masse.

Those predicting Elsevier’s downfall had assumed scientists experimenting with sharing their work for free online could slowly outcompete Elsevier’s titles by replacing them one at a time. In response, Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without. Pay, and the scientific lights stayed on, but refuse, and up to a quarter of the scientific literature would go dark at any one institution. It concentrated immense power in the hands of the largest publishers, and Elsevier’s profits began another steep rise that would lead them into the billions by the 2010s. In 2015, a Financial Times article anointed Elsevier “the business the internet could not kill”.

Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)

“Despite my giving sermons all over the world on this topic, it seems journals hold sway even more prominently than before,” Randy Schekman told me. It is that influence, more than the profits that drove the system’s expansion, that most frustrates scientists today.

Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company publishes 1.5m papers a year; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review. “We help researchers be more productive and efficient,” Alicia Wise, senior vice president of global strategic networks, told me. “And that’s a win for research institutions, and for research funders like governments.”

On the question of why so many scientists are so critical of journal publishers, Tom Reller, vice president of corporate relations at Elsevier, said: “It’s not for us to talk about other people’s motivations. We look at the numbers [of scientists who trust their results to Elsevier] and that suggests we are doing a good job.” Asked about criticisms of Elsevier’s business model, Reller said in an email that these criticisms overlooked “all the things that publishers do to add value – above and beyond the contributions that public-sector funding brings”. That, he said, is what they were charging for.

In a sense, it is not any one publisher’s fault that the scientific world seems to bend to the industry’s gravitational pull. When governments including those of China and Mexico offer financial bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, they are not responding to a demand by any specific publisher, but following the rewards of an enormously complex system that has to accommodate the utopian ideals of science with the commercial goals of the publishers that dominate it. (“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in,” Neal Young told me.)

Since the early 2000s, scientists have championed an alternative to subscription publishing called “open access”. This solves the difficulty of balancing scientific and commercial imperatives by simply removing the commercial element. In practice, this usually takes the form of online journals, to which scientists pay an upfront free to cover editing costs, which then ensure the work is available free to access for anyone in perpetuity. But despite the backing of some of the biggest funding agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, only about a quarter of scientific papers are made freely available at the time of their publication.

The idea that scientific research should be freely available for anyone to use is a sharp departure, even a threat, to the current system – which relies on publishers’ ability to restrict access to the scientific literature in order to maintain its immense profitability. In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.

Elbakyan is an unabashed utopian. “Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers,” she told me in an email. In a letter to the court, she cited the cited Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.

Whatever the fate of Sci-Hub, it seems that frustration with the current system is growing. But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.

The hi-tech war on science fraud

Stephen Buranyi in The Guardian


One morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations – which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor – just a few rounding errors – but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. “At first I was a bit frightened,” he said. “I felt a bit exposed.”

Kauff wasn’t alone. Statcheck had read some 50,000 published psychology papers and checked the maths behind every statistical result it encountered. In the space of 24 hours, virtually every academic active in the field in the past two decades had received an email from the program, informing them that their work had been reviewed. Nothing like this had ever been seen before: a massive, open, retroactive evaluation of scientific literature, conducted entirely by computer.

Statcheck’s method was relatively simple, more like the mathematical equivalent of a spellchecker than a thoughtful review, but some scientists saw it as a new form of scrutiny and suspicion, portending a future in which the objective authority of peer review would be undermined by unaccountable and uncredentialed critics.

Susan Fiske, the former head of the Association for Psychological Science, wrote an op-ed accusing “self-appointed data police” of pioneering a new “form of harassment”. The German Psychological Society issued a statement condemning the unauthorised use of Statcheck. The intensity of the reaction suggested that many were afraid that the program was not just attributing mere statistical errors, but some impropriety, to the scientists.

The man behind all this controversy was a 25-year-old Dutch scientist named Chris Hartgerink, based at Tilburg University’s Meta-Research Center, which studies bias and error in science. Statcheck was the brainchild of Hartgerink’s colleague Michèle Nuijten, who had used the program to conduct a 2015 study that demonstrated that about half of all papers in psychology journals contained a statistical error. Nuijten’s study was written up in Nature as a valuable contribution to the growing literature acknowledging bias and error in science – but she had not published an inventory of the specific errors it had detected, or the authors who had committed them. The real flashpoint came months later,when Hartgerink modified Statcheck with some code of his own devising, which catalogued the individual errors and posted them online – sparking uproar across the scientific community.

Hartgerink is one of only a handful of researchers in the world who work full-time on the problem of scientific fraud – and he is perfectly happy to upset his peers. “The scientific system as we know it is pretty screwed up,” he told me last autumn. Sitting in the offices of the Meta-Research Center, which look out on to Tilburg’s grey, mid-century campus, he added: “I’ve known for years that I want to help improve it.” Hartgerink approaches his work with a professorial seriousness – his office is bare, except for a pile of statistics textbooks and an equation-filled whiteboard – and he is appealingly earnest about his aims. His conversations tend to rapidly ascend to great heights, as if they were balloons released from his hands – the simplest things soon become grand questions of ethics, or privacy, or the future of science.

“Statcheck is a good example of what is now possible,” he said. The top priority,for Hartgerink, is something much more grave than correcting simple statistical miscalculations. He is now proposing to deploy a similar program that will uncover fake or manipulated results – which he believes are far more prevalent than most scientists would like to admit.

When it comes to fraud – or in the more neutral terms he prefers, “scientific misconduct” – Hartgerink is aware that he is venturing into sensitive territory. “It is not something people enjoy talking about,” he told me, with a weary grin. Despite its professed commitment to self-correction, science is a discipline that relies mainly on a culture of mutual trust and good faith to stay clean. Talking about its faults can feel like a kind of heresy. In 1981, when a young Al Gore led a congressional inquiry into a spate of recent cases of scientific fraud in biomedicine, the historian Daniel Kevles observed that “for Gore and for many others, fraud in the biomedical sciences was akin to pederasty among priests”.

The comparison is apt. The exposure of fraud directly threatens the special claim science has on truth, which relies on the belief that its methods are purely rational and objective. As the congressmen warned scientists during the hearings, “each and every case of fraud serves to undermine the public’s trust in the research enterprise of our nation”.

But three decades later, scientists still have only the most crude estimates of how much fraud actually exists. The current accepted standard is a 2009 study by the Stanford researcher Daniele Fanelli that collated the results of 21 previous surveys given to scientists in various fields about research misconduct. The studies, which depended entirely on scientists honestly reporting their own misconduct, concluded that about 2% of scientists had falsified data at some point in their career.

If Fanelli’s estimate is correct, it seems likely that thousands of scientists are getting away with misconduct each year. Fraud – including outright fabrication, plagiarism and self-plagiarism – accounts for the majority of retracted scientific articles. But, according to RetractionWatch, which catalogues papers that have been withdrawn from the scientific literature, only 684 were retracted in 2015, while more than 800,000 new papers were published. If even just a few of the suggested 2% of scientific fraudsters – which, relying on self-reporting, is itself probably a conservative estimate – are active in any given year, the vast majority are going totally undetected. “Reviewers and editors, other gatekeepers – they’re not looking for potential problems,” Hartgerink said.

But if none of the traditional authorities in science are going to address the problem, Hartgerink believes that there is another way. If a program similar to Statcheck can be trained to detect the traces of manipulated data, and then make those results public, the scientific community can decide for itself whether a given study should still be regarded as trustworthy.

Hartgerink’s university, which sits at the western edge of Tilburg, a small, quiet city in the southern Netherlands, seems an unlikely place to try and correct this hole in the scientific process. The university is best known for its economics and business courses and does not have traditional lab facilities. But Tilburg was also the site of one of the biggest scientific scandals in living memory – and no one knows better than Hartgerink and his colleagues just how devastating individual cases of fraud can be.

In September 2010, the School of Social and Behavioral Science at Tilburg University appointed Diederik Stapel, a promising young social psychologist, as its new dean. Stapel was already popular with students for his warm manner, and with the faculty for his easy command of scientific literature and his enthusiasm for collaboration. He would often offer to help his colleagues, and sometimes even his students, by conducting surveys and gathering data for them.

As dean, Stapel appeared to reward his colleagues’ faith in him almost immediately. In April 2011 he published a paper in Science, the first study the small university had ever landed in that prestigious journal. Stapel’s research focused on what psychologists call “priming”: the idea that small stimuli can affect our behaviour in unnoticed but significant ways. “Could being discriminated against depend on such seemingly trivial matters as garbage on the streets?” Stapel’s paper in Science asked. He proceeded to show that white commuters at the Utrecht railway station tended to sit further away from visible minorities when the station was dirty. Similarly, Stapel found that white people were more likely to give negative answers on a quiz about minorities if they were interviewed on a dirty street, rather than a clean one.

Stapel had a knack for devising and executing such clever studies, cutting through messy problems to extract clean data. Since becoming a professor a decade earlier, he had published more than 100 papers, showing, among other things, that beauty product advertisements, regardless of context, prompted women to think about themselves more negatively, and that judges who had been primed to think about concepts of impartial justice were less likely to make racially motivated decisions.

His findings regularly reached the public through the media. The idea that huge, intractable social issues such as sexism and racism could be affected in such simple ways had a powerful intuitive appeal, and hinted at the possibility of equally simple, elegant solutions. If anything united Stapel’s diverse interests, it was this Gladwellian bent. His studies were often featured in the popular press, including the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and he was a regular guest on Dutch television programmes.

But as Stapel’s reputation skyrocketed, a small group of colleagues and students began to view him with suspicion. “It was too good to be true,” a professor who was working at Tilburg at the time told me. (The professor, who I will call Joseph Robin, asked to remain anonymous so that he could frankly discuss his role in exposing Stapel.) “All of his experiments worked. That just doesn’t happen.”

A student of Stapel’s had mentioned to Robin in 2010 that some of Stapel’s data looked strange, so that autumn, shortly after Stapel was made Dean, Robin proposed a collaboration with him, hoping to see his methods first-hand. Stapel agreed, and the data he returned a few months later, according to Robin, “looked crazy. It was internally inconsistent in weird ways; completely unlike any real data I had ever seen.” Meanwhile, as the student helped get hold of more datasets from Stapel’s former students and collaborators, the evidence mounted: more “weird data”, and identical sets of numbers copied directly from one study to another.
In August 2011, the whistleblowers took their findings to the head of the department, Marcel Zeelenberg, who confronted Stapel with the evidence. At first, Stapel denied the charges, but just days later he admitted what his accusers suspected: he had never interviewed any commuters at the railway station, no women had been shown beauty advertisements and no judges had been surveyed about impartial justice and racism.

Stapel hadn’t just tinkered with numbers, he had made most of them up entirely, producing entire datasets at home in his kitchen after his wife and children had gone to bed. His method was an inversion of the proper scientific method: he started by deciding what result he wanted and then worked backwards, filling out the individual “data” points he was supposed to be collecting.

On 7 September 2011, the university revealed that Stapel had been suspended. The media initially speculated that there might have been an issue with his latest study – announced just days earlier, showing that meat-eaters were more selfish and less sociable – but the problem went much deeper. Stapel’s students and colleagues were about to learn that his enviable skill with data was, in fact, a sham, and his golden reputation, as well as nearly a decade of results that they had used in their own work, were built on lies.

Chris Hartgerink was studying late at the library when he heard the news. The extent of Stapel’s fraud wasn’t clear by then, but it was big. Hartgerink, who was then an undergraduate in the Tilburg psychology programme, felt a sudden disorientation, a sense that something solid and integral had been lost. Stapel had been a mentor to him, hiring him as a research assistant and giving him constant encouragement. “This is a guy who inspired me to actually become enthusiastic about research,” Hartgerink told me. “When that reason drops out, what remains, you know?”

Hartgerink wasn’t alone; the whole university was stunned. “It was a really difficult time,” said one student who had helped expose Stapel. “You saw these people on a daily basis who were so proud of their work, and you know it’s just based on a lie.” Even after Stapel resigned, the media coverage was relentless. Reporters roamed the campus – first from the Dutch press, and then, as the story got bigger, from all over the world.

On 9 September, just two days after Stapel was suspended, the university convened an ad-hoc investigative committee of current and former faculty. To help determine the true extent of Stapel’s fraud, the committee turned to Marcel van Assen, a statistician and psychologist in the department. At the time, Van Assen was growing bored with his current research, and the idea of investigating the former dean sounded like fun to him. Van Assen had never much liked Stapel, believing that he relied more on the force of his personality than reason when running the department. “Some people believe him charismatic,” Van Assen told me. “I am less sensitive to it.”

Van Assen – who is 44, tall and rangy, with a mop of greying, curly hair – approaches his work with relentless, unsentimental practicality. When speaking, he maintains an amused, half-smile, as if he is joking. He once told me that to fix the problems in psychology, it might be simpler to toss out 150 years of research and start again; I’m still not sure whether or not he was serious.

To prove misconduct, Van Assen said, you must be a pitbull: biting deeper and deeper, clamping down not just on the papers, but the datasets behind them, the research methods, the collaborators – using everything available to bring down the target. He spent a year breaking down the 45 studies Stapel produced at Tilburg and cataloguing their individual aberrations, noting where the effect size – a standard measure of the difference between the two groups in an experiment –seemed suspiciously large, where sequences of numbers were copied, where variables were too closely related, or where variables that should have moved in tandem instead appeared adrift.

The committee released its final report in October 2012 and, based largely on its conclusions, 55 of Stapel’s publications were officially retracted by the journals that had published them. Stapel also returned his PhD to the University of Amsterdam. He is, by any measure, one of the biggest scientific frauds of all time. (RetractionWatch has him third on their all-time retraction leaderboard.) The committee also had harsh words for Stapel’s colleagues, concluding that “from the bottom to the top, there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards”. “It was a real blow to the faculty,” Jacques Hagenaars, a former professor of methodology at Tilburg, who served on the committee, told me.

By extending some of the blame to the methods and attitudes of the scientists around Stapel, the committee situated the case within a larger problem that was attracting attention at the time, which has come to be known as the “replication crisis”. For the past decade, the scientific community has been grappling with the discovery that many published results cannot be reproduced independently by other scientists – in spite of the traditional safeguards of publishing and peer-review – because the original studies were marred by some combination of unchecked bias and human error.

After the committee disbanded, Van Assen found himself fascinated by the way science is susceptible to error, bias, and outright fraud. Investigating Stapel had been exciting, and he had no interest in returning to his old work. Van Assen had also found a like mind, a new professor at Tilburg named Jelte Wicherts, who had a long history working on bias in science and who shared his attitude of upbeat cynicism about the problems in their field. “We simply agree, there are findings out there that cannot be trusted,” Van Assen said. They began planning a new sort of research group: one that would investigate the very practice of science.

Van Assen does not like assigning Stapel too much credit for the creation of the Meta-Research Center, which hired its first students in late 2012, but there is an undeniable symmetry: he and Wicherts have created, in Stapel’s old department, a platform to investigate the sort of “sloppy science” and misconduct that very department had been condemned for.

Hartgerink joined the group in 2013. “For many people, certainly for me, Stapel launched an existential crisis in science,” he said. After Stapel’s fraud was exposed, Hartgerink struggled to find “what could be trusted” in his chosen field. He began to notice how easy it was for scientists to subjectively interpret data – or manipulate it. For a brief time he considered abandoning a future in research and joining the police.


There are probably several very famous papers that have fake data, and very famous people who have done it

Van Assen, who Hartgerink met through a statistics course, helped put him on another path. Hartgerink learned that a growing number of scientists in every field were coming to agree that the most urgent task for their profession was to establish what results and methods could still be trusted – and that many of these people had begun to investigate the unpredictable human factors that, knowingly or not, knocked science off its course. What was more, he could be a part of it. Van Assen offered Hartgerink a place in his yet-unnamed research group. All of the current projects were on errors or general bias, but Van Assen proposed they go out and work closer to the fringes, developing methods that could detect fake data in published scientific literature.

“I’m not normally an expressive person,” Hartgerink told me. “But I said: ‘Hell, yes. Let’s do that.’”

Hartgerink and Van Assen believe not only that most scientific fraud goes undetected, but that the true rate of misconduct is far higher than 2%. “We cannot trust self reports,” Van Assen told me. “If you ask people, ‘At the conference, did you cheat on your fiancee?’ – people will very likely not admit this.”

Uri Simonsohn, a psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who gained notoriety as a “data vigilante” for exposing two serious cases of fraud in his field in 2012, believes that as much as 5% of all published research contains fraudulent data. “It’s not only in the periphery, it’s not only in the journals people don’t read,” he told me. “There are probably several very famous papers that have fake data, and very famous people who have done it.”
But as long as it remains undiscovered, there is a tendency for scientists to dismiss fraud in favour of more widely documented – and less seedy – issues. Even Arturo Casadevall, an American microbiologist who has published extensively on the rate, distribution, and detection of fraud in science, told me that despite his personal interest in the topic, my time would be better served investigating the broader issues driving the replication crisis. Fraud, he said, was “probably a relatively minor problem in terms of the overall level of science”.

This way of thinking goes back at least as far as scientists have been grappling with high-profile cases of misconduct. In 1983, Peter Medawar, the British immunologist and Nobel laureate, wrote in the London Review of Books: “The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of ‘tips of icebergs’, they have not been so numerous as to prevent science’s having become the most successful enterprise (in terms of the fulfilment of declared ambitions) that human beings have ever engaged upon.”

From this perspective, as long as science continues doing what it does well – as long as genes are sequenced and chemicals classified and diseases reliably identified and treated – then fraud will remain a minor concern. But while this may be true in the long run, it may also be dangerously complacent. Furthermore, scientific misconduct can cause serious harm, as, for instance, in the case of patients treated by Paolo Macchiarini, a doctor at Karolinska Institute in Sweden who allegedly misrepresented the effectiveness of an experimental surgical procedure he had developed. Macchiarini is currently being investigated by a Swedish prosecutor after several of the patients who received the procedure later died.

Even in the more mundane business of day-to-day research, scientists are constantly building on past work, relying on its solidity to underpin their own theories. If misconduct really is as widespread as Hartgerink and Van Assen think, then false results are strewn across scientific literature, like unexploded mines that threaten any new structure built over them. At the very least, if science is truly invested in its ideal of self-correction, it seems essential to know the extent of the problem.

But there is little motivation within the scientific community to ramp up efforts to detect fraud. Part of this has to do with the way the field is organised. Science isn’t a traditional hierarchy, but a loose confederation of research groups, institutions, and professional organisations. Universities are clearly central to the scientific enterprise, but they are not in the business of evaluating scientific results, and as long as fraud doesn’t become public they have little incentive to go after it. There is also the questionable perception, although widespread in the scientific community, that there are already measures in place that preclude fraud. When Gore and his fellow congressmen held their hearings 35 years ago, witnesses routinely insisted that science had a variety of self-correcting mechanisms, such as peer-review and replication. But, as the science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade pointed out at the time, the vast majority of cases of fraud are actually exposed by whistleblowers, and that holds true to this day.
And so the enormous task of keeping science honest is left to individual scientists in the hope that they will police themselves, and each other. “Not only is it not sustainable,” said Simonsohn, “it doesn’t even work. You only catch the most obvious fakers, and only a small share of them.” There is also the problem of relying on whistleblowers, who face the thankless and emotionally draining prospect of accusing their own colleagues of fraud. (“It’s like saying someone is a paedophile,” one of the students at Tilburg told me.) Neither Simonsohn nor any of the Tilburg whistleblowers I interviewed said they would come forward again. “There is no way we as a field can deal with fraud like this,” the student said. “There has to be a better way.”

In the winter of 2013, soon after Hartgerink began working with Van Assen, they began to investigate another social psychology researcher who they noticed was reporting suspiciously large effect sizes, one of the “tells” that doomed Stapel. When they requested that the researcher provide additional data to verify her results, she stalled – claiming that she was undergoing treatment for stomach cancer. Months later, she informed them that she had deleted all the data in question. But instead of contacting the researcher’s co-authors for copies of the data, or digging deeper into her previous work, they opted to let it go.

They had been thoroughly stonewalled, and they knew that trying to prosecute individual cases of fraud – the “pitbull” approach that Van Assen had taken when investigating Stapel – would never expose more than a handful of dishonest scientists. What they needed was a way to analyse vast quantities of data in search of signs of manipulation or error, which could then be flagged for public inspection without necessarily accusing the individual scientists of deliberate misconduct. After all, putting a fence around a minefield has many of the same benefits as clearing it, with none of the tricky business of digging up the mines.

As Van Assen had earlier argued in a letter to the journal Nature, the traditional approach to investigating other scientists was needlessly fraught – since it combined the messy task of proving that a researcher had intended to commit fraud with a much simpler technical problem: whether the data underlying their results was valid. The two issues, he argued, could be separated.

Scientists can commit fraud in a multitude of ways. In 1974, the American immunologist William Summerlin famously tried to pass a patch of skin on a mouse darkened with permanent marker pen as a successful interspecies skin-graft. But most instances are more mundane: the majority of fraud cases in recent years have emerged from scientists either falsifying images – deliberately mislabelling scans and micrographs – or fabricating or altering their recorded data. And scientists have used statistical tests to scrutinise each other’s data since at least the 1930s, when Ronald Fisher, the father of biostatistics, used a basic chi-squared test to suggest that Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, had cherrypicked some of his data.

In 2014, Hartgerink and Van Assen started to sort through the variety of tests used in ad-hoc investigations of fraud in order to determine which were powerful and versatile enough to reliably detect statistical anomalies across a wide range of fields. After narrowing down a promising arsenal of tests, they hit a tougher problem. To prove that their methods work, Hartgerink and Van Assen have to show they can reliably distinguish false from real data. But research misconduct is relatively uncharted territory. Only a handful of cases come to light each year – a dismally small sample size – so it’s hard to get an idea of what constitutes “normal” fake data, what its features and particular quirks are. Hartgerink devised a workaround, challenging other academics to produce simple fake datasets, a sort of game to see if they could come up with data that looked real enough to fool the statistical tests, with an Amazon gift card as a prize.

By 2015, the Meta-Research group had expanded to seven researchers, and Hartgerink was helping his colleagues with a separate error-detection project that would become Statcheck. He was pleased with the study that Michèle Nuitjen published that autumn, which used Statcheck to show that something like half of all published psychology papers appeared to contain calculation errors, but as he tinkered with the program and the database of psychology papers they had assembled, he found himself increasingly uneasy about what he saw as the closed and secretive culture of science.
When scientists publish papers in journals, they release only the data they wish to share. Critical evaluation of the results by other scientists – peer review – takes place in secret and the discussion is not released publicly. Once a paper is published, all comments, concerns, and retractions must go through the editors of the journal before they reach the public. There are good, or at least defensible, arguments for all of this. But Hartgerink is part of an increasingly vocal group that believes that the closed nature of science, with authority resting in the hands of specific gatekeepers – journals, universities, and funders – is harmful, and that a more open approach would better serve the scientific method.

Hartgerink realised that with a few adjustments to Statcheck, he could make public all the statistical errors it had exposed. He hoped that this would shift the conversation away from talk of broad, representative results – such as the proportion of studies that contained errors – and towards a discussion of the individual papers and their mistakes. The critique would be complete, exhaustive, and in the public domain, where the authors could address it; everyone else could draw their own conclusions.

In August 2016, with his colleagues’ blessing, he posted the full set of Statcheck results publicly on the anonymous science message board PubPeer. At first there was praise on Twitter and science blogs, which skew young and progressive – and then, condemnations, largely from older scientists, who feared an intrusive new world of public blaming and shaming. In December, after everyone had weighed in, Nature, a bellwether of mainstream scientific thought for more than a century, cautiously supported a future of automated scientific scrutiny in an editorial that addressed the Statcheck controversy without explicitly naming it. Its conclusion seemed to endorse Hartgerink’s approach, that “criticism itself must be embraced”.

In the same month, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), an obscure branch of the US National Institutes of Health, awarded Hartgerink a small grant – about $100,000 – to pursue new projects investigating misconduct, including the completion of his program to detect fabricated data. For Hartgerink and Van Assen, who had not received any outside funding for their research, it felt like vindication.

Yet change in science comes slowly, if at all, Van Assen reminded me. The current push for more open and accountable science, of which they are a part, has “only really existed since 2011”, he said. It has captured an outsize share of the science media’s attention, and set laudable goals, but it remains a small, fragile outpost of true believers within the vast scientific enterprise. “I have the impression that many scientists in this group think that things are going to change.” Van Assen said. “Chris, Michèle, they are quite optimistic. I think that’s bias. They talk to each other all the time.”

When I asked Hartgerink what it would take to totally eradicate fraud from the scientific process, he suggested that scientists make all of their data public; register the intentions of their work before conducting experiments, to prevent post-hoc reasoning, and that they have their results checked by algorithms during and after the publishing process.

To any working scientist – currently enjoying nearly unprecedented privacy and freedom for a profession that is in large part publicly funded – Hartgerink’s vision would be an unimaginably draconian scientific surveillance state. For his part, Hartgerink believes the preservation of public trust in science requires nothing less – but in the meantime, he intends to pursue this ideal without the explicit consent of the entire scientific community, by investigating published papers and making the results available to the public.

Even scientists who have done similar work uncovering fraud have reservations about Van Assen and Hartgerink’s approach. In January, I met with Dr John Carlisle and Dr Steve Yentis at an anaesthetics conference that took place in London, near Westminster Abbey. In 2012, Yentis, then the editor of the journal Anaesthesia, asked Carlisle to investigate data from a researcher named Yoshitaka Fujii, who the community suspected was falsifying clinical trials. In time, Carlisle demonstrated that 168 of Fujii’s trials contained dubious statistical results. Yentis and the other journal editors contacted Fujii’s employers, who launched a full investigation. Fujii currently sits at the top of the RetractionWatch leaderboard with 183 retracted studies. By sheer numbers he is the biggest scientific fraud in recorded history.


You’re saying to a person, ‘I think you’re a liar.’ How many fraudulent papers are worth one false accusation?

Carlisle, who, like Van Assen, found that he enjoyed the detective work (“it takes a certain personality, or personality disorder”, he said), showed me his latest project, a larger-scale analysis of the rate of suspicious clinical trial results across multiple fields of medicine. He and Yentis discussed their desire to automate these statistical tests – which, in theory, would look a lot like what Hartgerink and Van Assen are developing – but they have no plans to make the results public; instead they envision that journal editors might use the tests to screen incoming articles for signs of possible misconduct.

“It is an incredibly difficult balance,” said Yentis, “you’re saying to a person, ‘I think you’re a liar.’ We have to decide how many fraudulent papers are worth one false accusation. How many is too many?”

With the introduction of programs such as Statcheck, and the growing desire to conduct as much of the critical conversation as possible in public view, Yentis expects a stormy reckoning with those very questions. “That’s a big debate that hasn’t happened,” he said, “and it’s because we simply haven’t had the tools.”

For all their dispassionate distance, when Hartgerink and Van Assen say that they are simply identifying data that “cannot be trusted”, they mean flagging papers and authors that fail their tests. And, as they learned with Statcheck, for many scientists, that will be indistinguishable from an accusation of deceit. When Hartgerink eventually deploys his fraud-detection program, it will flag up some very real instances of fraud, as well as many unintentional errors and false positives – and present all of the results in a messy pile for the scientific community to sort out. Simonsohn called it “a bit like leaving a loaded gun on a playground”.

When I put this question to Van Assen, he told me it was certain that some scientists would be angered or offended by having their work and its possible errors exposed and discussed. He didn’t want to make anyone feel bad, he said – but he didn’t feel bad about it. Science should be about transparency, criticism, and truth.

“The problem, also with scientists, is that people think they are important, they think they have a special purpose in life,” he said. “Maybe you too. But that’s a human bias. I think when you look at it objectively, individuals don’t matter at all. We should only look at what is good for science and society.”