In the age of puritanical foolishness after the Second World War, a witty statement by a certain film star came from the USA to Europe: "I do not know why I should be ashamed to undress in front of a doctor. After all, he is a man like any other." This logic can be paraphrased and applied to any human endeavour, including frauds. These are as old as Mother Nature herself, and we encounter them from mimesis all the way up to high politics. Science is no exception. Ptolemy is said to have already copied his astronomical data from a colleague who by an unfortunate coincidence lived a little further away, so that when astronomers in the 20th century began to dig into it, they convicted him of plagiarism.
Even Galileo did not shrink from citing, among the arguments for the rotation of the Earth, an experiment that he thoroughly made up and never carried out. When his opponents objected that rotation would lead to a stone thrown from a height not landing perpendicularly but obliquely, and thus a little further away than at the foot of the perpendicular, he assured them that a stone thrown from the top of a mast would always land on the deck in the same place, whether the ship was standing still or sailing. As historians report, the experiment was carried out only several years later by his follower Giovanni Battista Baliani, who consistently took care that scientific truth be substantiated by "irrefutable experience."
Illustration: Matej Senko (2018)
If, of the quartet of motives collected by Koukolík, it was above all ideology and perhaps partly also pride that came into consideration in the cases mentioned, today career and money are moving into the leading driving position. In one of Renčín's jokes a scientist says to a journalist: Originally science did not interest me at all, but then I found out how much they give for the Nobel Prize. Pride, of course, we cannot unstitch; for many researchers prestige races replace adrenaline sports. Sometimes it is merely a prank. In December 2003 a certain David Hart declared that in his garage in Sutton Courtenay (near Oxford) he had found a "preserved dragon," more precisely something that looked like the embryo of a winged reptile "pickled" in formaldehyde in an eighty-centimetre glass flask. He confided in his friend Allistair Mitchell, and the two presented the find to the media, saying that with the little dragon there was a document about its origin. It had allegedly been offered at the end of the 19th century by German scientists to the Museum of Natural History (Mitchell claimed about this that it had been an attempt by the Germans to discredit British science). David's grandfather, who was a doorman at the museum, took the exhibit, which was destined for disposal, home and stored it in the garage, where after many years his grandson "found" it. In reality the little dragon was made by a model-maker based on a television programme about dinosaurs, and the vessel was procured in a special glassworks. Not even a chicken scratches up dragons for free; it was not merely a prank — the action also served as advertising for Mitchell's new book Unearthly History (Nadpřirozená historie) and secured the author a contract with one large publishing house. Another example of non-aggressive and non-offensive humour is the BBC's April Fools' hoax from 1957. In the popular and widely watched programme Panorama a report was broadcast from southern Switzerland capturing spring in full bloom. The ideal weather and the low occurrence of the weevil beetle allowed a rich crop of spaghetti to ripen as well. The cameraman filmed young women in folk costumes plucking spaghetti fruits from the spaghetti trees, which they then consumed in the evening at a festival. The long-standing breeding effort was, according to the film's authors, crowned also by the fact that all the spaghetti strands are equally long and, after a short drying in the spring sun, can be dispatched to the market. Tens of thousands of people fell for the bait. Those interested will find the incriminated report at the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU Let us, however, go into the world of hard scientific battles, where there is no shortage of psychopathic moves. Helicobacter pylori was reliably identified only in the 35th round of attempts at its cultivation, partly by lucky chance. Because Easter intruded into the process, the cultivation lasted five days instead of the standard two, and thereby it succeeded. Warren and Marshall reported the discovery in two separate articles, each on his own, without co-authors, in the journal Lancet in 1983. Both articles were published in the same issue of the journal; Marshall even used a picture of the bacterium in his article without stating that its author was Armstrong. Marshall then, as proof that this is the agent causing peptic ulcer, drank the culture and got an ulcer. In 2005 Warren and Marshall received the Nobel Prize for "their" discovery. Their close collaborators Goodwin and Armstrong came away empty-handed and got nothing, even though the former cultivated the bacterium from clinical material and Armstrong described it and classified it correctly even before the cultivations of the two Nobel laureates came about. Nevertheless, as studies focused on the intestinal microbiome show, Helicobacter is present in a considerable part of the population that by no means suffers from ulcer disease. Labelling it an "obligate pathogen" is dubious, and the classification of ulcer disease among infections is nonsensical. Crick and Watson "forgot," in their work concerning the discovery of the double-helix structure, to mention the origin and significance of "photograph 51," which was taken by Rosalind Franklin. As Candance Pert, another of the victims of sexism in science, writes, it was Rosalind who provided a number of pieces of evidence and made it possible for two later Nobel laureates to overtake Linus Pauling. According to her, Rosalind was a classic "nun of science" who devoted her entire life to work. Candance Pert states: In James D. Watson's book The double Helix (Tajemství DNA, Academia, 2003) we see how this woman was regarded by her male colleagues. The pages of the book almost overflow with contempt as Watson justifies his own and Crick's conduct. But the truth was that these two men visited Rosalind Franklin's laboratory when she was out of town and persuaded her boss to allow them to look into her notes... When this fact later began to be made public and hashed over, one of the great British dailies, The Guardian, printed an interesting defence, which ends with this unconvincing but earnestly meant paragraph: Franklin died four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded, and so she never learned in full extent how Watson and Crick built their model from her data. If she ever suspected them, she did not show it and was on friendly terms with Crick and his wife Odile. It is clear that had she lived, the Nobel committee should have honoured her too, for her fundamental understanding of the structure of the DNA molecule and her significant contribution to Watson and Crick, because her crystallographic data were just as good, if not better, than Wilkins's. Candance Pert discovered the morphine receptor. It happened during her doctoral studies at the workplace of the renowned Solomon Snyder, and as she writes in the above-cited autobiographical and at the same time popular-science book Molekuly emocí (AGAN, 2016), it happened after her boss, on account of her allegedly slow procedure that led to nothing sensible, assigned her another task and stopped the work on the morphine receptor. The obstinate scientist managed, in her free time and using dodo (Czech abbreviation: dodělej doma — finish it at home) means, to bring the task to completion and to make her workplace famous. The greater the success, the greater was her disillusionment when she found out that three "boys," Kosterlitz, Hughes and Snyder, were vying for the Lasker Award — which is rightly regarded as a precursor of the Nobel Prize — for her work, and that they had, as a woman, elbowed her out of it. Aware of how the Rosalind Franklin mentioned here had fared, Pert turned directly to the director of the Lasker Foundation and explained the situation to her. Nothing more was done about the nomination of those three, but Snyder — despite his other indisputable discoveries — never again came close to a Nobel Prize. Candance Perth, with the stamp of an outcast (how dare she!), went on working tirelessly and contributed significantly to the findings concerning the unity of "body and soul" (today "mind" is fashionable). I do not know what the journalistic code of ethics is, but I very much took a liking to the obituary of Candance Pert that Emily Langer perpetrated for The Washington Post, in this case a laureate for the title of distinguished rectal alpinist in relation to the giants of science. She commented on the aforementioned repugnant activity of the befriended "boys" with the words: On the other hand, it is generally assumed that young scientists stay aside when the older ones take credit for group achievements, understanding it to mean that this privilege will fall to them too, later in their careers. It is hard to add anything to such a mature moral judgment of the watchdog bitch of democracy. Except perhaps the old Czech proverb: Sit in the corner, little maiden; if you are good, they will find you. MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author's blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php