Book review: Simon LeVay's "When Science Goes Wrong"

Recently I bought When Science Goes Wrong: Twelve Tales from the Dark Side of Discovery by Simon LeVay. The author appeared on The Daily Show, and it sounded like it might be an interesting read. I thought that an every-now-and-again book review might be interesting for this blog -- I don't read a ton of nonfiction, but there's a lot of underappreciated pop-science writing out there.

So, obviously the following is subjective; your mileage may vary.

Scorecard

Accessibility / readability: A-
Scientific merit: B-
Overall: B


When Science Goes Wrong is a very well-written book examining twelve cases (of varying degrees of infamy) in which attempts to apply scientific discoveries in the wider world went horribly, horribly awry. It is an entertaining read, although the examples chosen verge on the sensationalistic. The biggest problem that I had with this book was that there was really very little attempt to put the examples in any kind of larger context. Although each chapter does allude briefly to the procedural changes that the disaster in question brought about, I think this very important aspect of the scientific approach was underemphasized, and it could leave the reader with the false impression that every science experiment is a disaster waiting to happen.

The author, Simon LeVay, is a neuroscientist. A quick PubMed search found over 35 publications from 1971 through 1991, although he seems to have stopped doing active research since then. Google finds his homepage, including his CV, which confirms that he took a break from traditional academia to write a number of nonfiction books and to co-found the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education in West Hollywood, California. In any case, he's best known for his controversial 1991 Science paper arguing for a biological/structural difference between the brains of homosexuals versus heterosexuals, in the size of the hypothalamus. He's a reasonably well-credentialled former working scientist, at least.

The structure of this book is to present anecdotes of incidents in which science (or the application thereof) went horribly awry. The book is well-researched, and the author has directly interviewed many of the people involved in each of the incidents -- at least, those willing to have their side of the story heard. He presents this information honestly, noting when details of what went wrong are unavailable -- in some cases, because the only people who actually know what went wrong ended up dead as a result of their mistakes. He describes in detail competing hypotheses of "what went wrong" and the evidence for and against each of those hypotheses.

The cases under discussion, and the field of science under which they fall, are as follows:

1) Neuroscience -- an unqualified (for this type of procedure) neuroscientist injected the brain of a Parkinson's patient with crudely prepared fetal cells (not exactly embryonic stem cells, but something like them.) He bypassed all the oversight checkpoints that would normally apply to a clinical trial for a completely unproven treatment by taking the patient to China and performing the procedure in a hospital there. The patient died in 1991, with grotesque brain damage that I won't go into, because it's... really grotesque.

2) Meteorology -- A major storm with hurricane-force winds struck England in 1987; it was not predicted by the meteorological service of the time, and caused massive damage including sixteen deaths onland and several more at sea. Blame for the faulty forecast was passed around.

3) Volcanology -- A group of scientists at a volcano conference descend into the caldera of an active volcano which, unfortunately, erupts while they are inside -- killing several of them. Many were not wearing proper safety equipment, and the trip had no significant scientific purpose.

4) Neuroscience -- A high-profile paper is published suggesting that the recreational drug Ecstasy causes severe brain damage; later, after being unable to reproduce the results of their original study, the researchers determined that the manufacturer may have mislabelled that lot of the drug, which was instead (probably) methamphetamine. Although the paper was retracted, it still is cited by policymakers in the war on drugs.

5) Engineering and Geology -- In 1928, a newly constructed dam breaks in southern California due to poor engineering within a matter of days after construction was completed. Hundreds die in the resulting flash flood.

6) Biology -- A 1999 gene therapy trial caused the death of one of its patients, due in large part to poor oversight and the failure of the investigators to halt the trial after some earlier patients showed some troubling side effects and little improvement.

7) Nuclear physics -- Three employees at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho died in 1961 in a catastrophic meltdown of the reactor during a maintenance operation. There is some suggestion that the meltdown may have been a murder/suicide, although it is impossible to know why the proximal cause (the lifting of a control rod too far out of position) happened. Subsequent reactor designs have been modified to have better backups in place.

8) Microbiology -- In 1979, a worker in a bioweapons plant in the Soviet Union removed a clogged filter from the building's ventilation system without replacing it, resulting in the release of anthrax spores into the atmosphere; at least sixty-six people in the surrounding city died. The Soviet government tried to cover up the incident for years.

9) Forensics -- A DNA lab in Houston, Texas is systematically sloppy in their analysis of DNA evidence, causing the wrongful conviction of a large number of suspects over a several-year period.

10) Space science -- The infamous case of the NASA probe to Mars (the Mars Climate Orbiter) in which subcontracted engineers wrote a course-correction program in which calculations were performed in English units rather than in metric, which is what the rest of the probe's software was using, causing the probe to be lost.

11) Psychology -- A 1939 study of the relationship between the appearance of stuttering behavior in children and positive/negative reinforcement of that behavior (i.e. being told by authority figures that you've been evaluated and that you are a stutterer) may have caused lifelong psychological harm to the children in the study.

12) Nuclear physics -- A group of researchers in 1999 announce the discovery of a new element, but are forced to retract that claim when it turns out that their data is irreproducible -- and it is discovered that one member of their team has falsified the data. Happily, the only thing to die is that researcher's career.

So, the book's approach is to provide anecdotal examples, which any scientist will tell you are worth very little. But to a lay reader, this book may give the impression that scientists are a bunch of crackpots and careless kooks, and this is the main source of the problem that I have with it. The author readily admits that the examples chosen are extreme cases, and while he does discuss the consequences of these errors, I really don't think enough context is provided. In fact, it is ridiculously easy to dismiss these anecdotes as telling us little about the scientific process. Some fail on account of age: are we really surprised that weather prediction (which no one has ever claimed is an exact science) was really lousy in 1987? Should we be shocked that engineers (without a formal engineering education) didn't do a great job 90 years ago? Is it news that the idea of informed consent did not exist in 1939? Academic science today bears little resemblance to most of these examples.

A little more context would inform us that there are today actual laws about using human subjects in research, including that studies must be approved by an Institutional Review Board before they can begin -- so that the 1939 language pathology study of chapter 11 absolutely could not happen today in the United States for several glaring reasons. The 1999 gene therapy trial death involved a failure of this type of oversight, but it truly was a rare case. The 1991 "stem cell" death, similarly, was caused by a deliberate evasion of these rules, to the point that the (unqualified) researcher took his patient overseas, beyond regulatory scrutiny, to perform the operation.

So, the book is an entertaining read at least, and the author does a wonderful job of making some advanced concepts in each of the above fields accessible. But the overall tone is a bit sensationalistic. Sure, science can go wrong in sometimes very dramatic ways. And it is incredibly unfortunate that some of these mistakes caused deaths. But in a larger sense, we've learned from some of the haphazard or sloppy mistakes of the past, and relative to the amount of science that goes on inside and outside of the lab, these disasters are incredibly rare -- far more rare than you would think from reading this book.

One thing I did find interesting, though, was the response to each of the incidents. In many cases there was a great deal of individual or institutional denial or passing of the blame. In other examples, later investigations found a system-wide problem and took steps to correct it. In the end, the most valuable conclusion of this book may be that researchers are only human, with all the conflicting motivations that that entails. That's true of all scientists, although it rarely ends so dramatically as in these twelve incidents.