Science - USA (2021-07-16)

288 16 JULY 2021 • VOL 373 ISSUE 6552 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I

n 1771, an idealistic British naturalist

named Henry Smeathman set sail for Af-

rica on a collecting trip. The 29-year-old’s

destination was Sierra Leone, famed

as a center of the colonial slave trade.

Smeathman hoped not only to amass

a treasure trove of insect specimens—his

particular area of interest—but also, along

the way, to better educate his fellow Eng-

lishmen about Black Africans, whom he

saw as a “little-known and much misrepre-

sented people.” He would fail on both counts.

Much of Smeathman’s collection was lost

to transportation disasters. His

ideals, meanwhile, were worn

away by financial desperation

and by the company he kept with

friendly, cash-rich slave trad-

ers. By 1773, Smeathman was

trafficking enslaved people to

support his collections. He was

far from the only naturalist to

become entangled with slavery

and its handy shipping routes,

notes Sam Kean in The Icepick

Surgeon, but his story provides

an excellent example of “how

intertwined science and slavery

were” and how easily the lucra-

tive practice could undermine

the morals of even the best-

intentioned scientist.

The question of “what pushes

men and women to cross the

line and commit crimes and mis-

deeds in the name of science” is

the focus of The Icepick Surgeon,

which explores several centuries’

worth of dubious research deci-

sions, from morally compromised collec-

tors of the past to forensic fraudsters of the

present. It is an intriguing question, and the

book—although sometimes imperfect in its

logic—serves as an important reminder that

science is ever a human enterprise.

Quoting Carl Jung, Kean notes that “an

evil person lurks inside all of us, and only

if we recognize that fact can we hope to

tame them.” That we often fail at taming

these impulses is the premise connecting

the separate stories of the book, an ap-

proach Kean has used with great charm

in previous books. A guided tour through

scientific misdeeds such as grave-robbing

and torture, however, offers trickier terrain

to explore and less opportunity for charm.

Still, Kean’s talent for spinning a delight-

ful tale shines on occasion. A chapter titled

“Sabotage: The Bone Wars,” for example,

which looks at the way scientists have

sometimes sought to sabotage each other’s

work, manages to be comically engag-

ing and dismaying at the same time. This

tale involves two leading paleontologists

of the late 19th century, Edward Drinker

Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who ob-

sessively attempted to outdo one another.

They deliberately smeared each other’s

reputations, stole fossils, and even salted

digs with fraudulent material. In the end,

however, Cope and Marsh did more harm

to each other than to the profession itself.

Their rivalry helped stock museums with

valuable specimens, led to discoveries of

new dinosaur species, and spurred public

interest in these long-vanished creatures.

In other chapters, the stories are ug-

lier, and the logic by which Kean con-

nects them to the bigger scientific picture

is sometimes unclear. A chapter on Nazi

medical experiments, for example, segues

into American infectious disease studies

that deceptively used people of color as

test subjects but passes over the American

eugenics movement of the early 20th cen-

tury. This is strange, considering that the

eugenics movement served as direct inspi-

ration for some of the Nazis’ most destruc-

tive “scientific” policies.

Meanwhile, a chapter on science and

murder revolves around a gruesome 19th-

century incident in which one Harvard

University researcher killed another. The

crime derived from an unpaid

personal debt, however, and did

not occur “in the name of sci-

ence” itself. Here again, Kean

rather puzzlingly ignores more

relevant instances in which re-

searchers used direct scientific

knowledge—such as a familiar-

ity with cyanide or thallium—to

commit murder ( 1 , 2 ).

The terrain over which the

book treads is murky, wide-rang-

ing, and complex, and not every

troubling story can be told. There

is no chapter, for instance, on sex-

ual misconduct, despite burgeon-

ing evidence that it is a pervasive

problem in the scientific commu-

nity. But Kean ultimately succeeds

in touching on many issues that

have fueled doubts about scien-

tists, including some doubts of

his own. Quoting Albert Einstein,

he writes: “Most people say that

it is the intellect which makes a

great scientist. They are wrong: it

is character.” Kean once dismissed this as a

facile line, he writes in his conclusion. But he

has come to believe it to be entirely true. j

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. “Pittsburgh researcher convicted of poisoning wife with
   cyanide,” CBS News, 7 November 2014; http://www.cbsnews.
   com/news/jury-pittsburgh-researcher-robert-ferrante-
   poisoned-his-wife-autumn-klein/.


2. “Bristol-Myers Squibb chemist used thallium to
   poison husband,” TAPinto Piscataway, 25 April
   2018; http://www.tapinto.net/towns/piscataway/
   sections/middlesex-county-news/articles/
   bristol-myers-squibb-chemist-used-thallium-to-poi-3.

10.1126/science.abj1846

SCIENTIFIC CONDUCT

By Deborah Blum

Researchers behaving badly

A collection of vivid historical tales reveals scientists

at their most fallible

The Icepick Surgeon:

Murder, Fraud, Sabotage,

Piracy, and Other Dastardly

Deeds Perpetrated in the

Name of Science

Sam Kean

Little, Brown, 2021. 368 pp.

Chemist and atomic spy Harry Gold leaves federal court in 1950.

INSIGHTS | BOOKS

The reviewer is the director of the Knight Science

Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, and the publisher

of Undark magazine. Email: [email protected]

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