The exchange between Schmaus and Weinstein in the September/ December 1981 Perspectives prompts an additional comment. While I applaud Schmaus' effort to recast the problem of fraud in science as a more generic tendency toward sloppiness, I must remind him that "sloppy research" and "fraudulent work" are post hoc judgments. If reform is the issue, then peer review is the mechanism by which duality control must be enhanced¹. If "procedures for validating the results" of one's research team are lacking, then journal and funding agency referees must enter the breach. Since this is apt to occur-soon if at all-we are thrust back on "investigator's responsibilities." Such individual ethics, however, is no surrogate for collective ethics which must reside in institutions that support, promote, disseminate, or otherwise utilize science and technology. Establishing collective ethics, however, may be as difficult as ferreting out intent to defraud one's patrons and peers. The problem, as Schmaus recognizes, is one of theory or better yet, world view, that defines away ethical dilemmas and precludes moral codes. To decouple the experimental aspect of science from these "conceptual boxes," as Kuhn called them, is to erect (or maintain) a mythical ideal of both science as an institution and scientists as cultural, i.e., self-interested and political, beings.

It is such maintenance that plagues Weinstein's rebuttal. For as recent work in the sociology of science (at least some European varieties) has shown, "truth" and "reliable knowledge" are not absolutes; they are socially negotiated claims²."Experimental science," to use Weinstein's phrase, is not "Janus-faced"-truth is. Hence, a call for more replication just begs the questions surrounding fraud. So do arguments that separate basic from applied, and biomedicine from other sciences. Again, if "replication of a multi-institutional clinical trial, such as the one at Boston University that Straws worked with, is financially and structurally impossible" (as Weinstein quoted Broad), then different criteria should be applied in reviewing such proposals at NCI or other agencies. Given the limited novelty that peer review engenders, the application of such criteria is dubious at best.

Finally, Weinstein's claim that "the growth of specialization and intensive division of labor makes it more difficult to rely on a preponderance of honest reports to counterbalance instances of fraudulent reporting" is utterly without foundation. Specialization should intensify the scrutiny of specialists whose breadth of research focus has shrunk. Only if the growing number of specialists has also become exceedingly callous and sloppy in their research and review procedures should fraud go undetected.

My own intuition is that fraud and sloppiness are intrinsic to science and only our presumption that scientists have been pure has placed the institution on a pedestal. There,the mythology has expanded to obscure the darker side. Now that this side is being illuminated, we social scientists must either rationalize our naivete or commit ourselves to studying quality control-whether or not we gain access to participants' intentions. Fraud and sloppiness are only symptoms; the body politic of science carries a common institutional disease.

Daryl E. Chubin
Technology & Science
Policy Program
School of Social Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332

Footnotes
1. D. E. Chubin, "Peer review and the courts: Notes of a participant scientist." Bulletin of Science, Technology 6 Society 2 (1982): forthcoming; D. E. Chubin, "In science, as in scientific malpractice, competence is not enough." The Hastings Center Report 12 (1982): Forthcoming.
2. H. Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge Direct Editions, 1977); H. M. Collins, "The seven sexes: A study in the sociology of a phenomenon or the replication of experiments in physics." Sociology 9 (1974): 205-224; M. J. Mulkey, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); R. Wallis (ad.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge (Keele, Staffordshire; University of Keefe, 1979).