Jan Hendrik Schon's success seemed too good to be true, and it was. In only four years as a physicist at Bell Laboratories, Schon, 32, had co-authored 90 scientific papers—one every 16 days—detailing new discoveries in superconductivity, lasers, nanotechnology and quantum physics. This output astonished his colleagues, and made them suspicious. When one co-worker noticed that the same table of data appeared in two separate papers—which also happened to appear in the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Science and Nature—the jig was up. In October 2002, a Bell Labs investigation found that Schon had falsified and fabricated data. His career as a scientist was finished. Scientific scandals, which are as old as science itself, tend to follow similar patterns of presumption and due reward.
In recent years, of course, the pressure on scientists to publish in the top journals has increased, making the journals much more crucial to career success. The questions are whether Nature and Science have become too powerful as arbiters of what science reaches to the public, and whether the journals are up to their task as gatekeepers.
Each scientific specialty has its own set of journals. Physicists have Physical Review Letters, neuroscientists have Neuron, and so forth. Science and Nature, though, are the only two major journals that cover the gamut of scientific disciplines, from meteorology and zoology to quantum physics and chemistry. As a result, journalists look to them each week for the cream of the crop of new science papers. And scientists look to the journals in part to reach journalists. Why do they care? Competition for grants has gotten so fierce that scientists have sought popular renown to gain an edge over their rivals. Publication in specialized journals will win the acclaims from academics and satisfy the publish-or-perish imperative, but Science and Nature come with the added bonus of potentially getting your paper written up in The New York Times and other publications.
Scientists tend to pay more attention to the big two than to other journals. When more scientists know about a particular paper, they're more apt to cite it in their own papers. Being oft-cited will increase a scientist's "Impact Factor", a measure of how often papers are cited by peers. Funding agencies use the "Impact Factor" as a rough measure of the influence of scientists they're considering supporting. Shortly after the death of emperor Theodosius in 395 A.D., the Roman Empire was permanently divided into Eastern and Western empires. By the fifth century A.D., the power of the Western Roman Empire had declined considerably, though the Eastern Roman Empire centered in Byzantium continued to flourish. Various problems contributed to this undermining of the West.
The accessions of Arcadius and Honorius, sons of Theodosius, as emperors in the East and West, respectively, illustrate the unfortunate pattern of child heirs that had unfavorable effects for both empires. When Arcadins died in 408, he was succeeded by his seven-year-old son, Theodosius Ⅱ. Reigning until 423, Honorius was succeeded by his nephew Valentinian Ⅲ, who was only five. Because of their young ages, Theodosius' sons and grandsons could not rule without older advisors and supervising regents upon whom they naturally became dependent and from whom they were unable to breakaway after reaching maturity. As powerful individuals vied for influence and dominance at court, the general welfare was often sacrificed to private rivalries and ambitions. Moreover, it was the women of the dynasty who were the more capable and interesting characters. Holding the keys to succession through birth and inheritance, they became active players in the political arena.
Compared with the East, however, the West faced a greater number of external threats along more permeable frontiers. Whereas the East could pursue war and diplomacy more effectively with their enemies on the long eastern frontier, the West was exposed to the more volatile tribal Germanic peoples on a frontier that stretched along the Rhine and Danube rivers for 1,000 miles. The East, however, only had to guard the last 500 miles of the Danube. In addition, the East had many more human and material resources with which to pursue its military and diplomatic objectives. The East also had a more deeply rooted unity in the Greek culture of the numerous Greek and Near Eastern cities that Rome had inherited from earlier Grecian empires. Latin culture had not achieved comparable penetration of the less urbanized West outside of Italy. The penetration of Germanic culture from the north had been so extensive along the permeable Rhine-Danube frontier that it was often difficult to distinguish between barbarians (speakers of German and other languages unrelated to Latin) and Romans in those regions by the fifth century anyway.
One of the most outstanding features at the beginning of this period was the prominence of Germanic generals in the high command of the Roman Imperial army. The trend became significant, and several practical reasons can explain it. The foremost probably was the sheer need for military manpower that made it attractive to recruit bands of Germanic peoples for the armies, which, in turn, gave able chieftains and warlords the opportunity to gain imperial favor and advance in rank. Second, one way to turn Germanic chieftains from potential enemies into loyal supporters was to offer them a good position in the Roman military. Third, although Theodosius had risen to power as a military leader, he was also a cultured aristocrat and preferred to emphasize the civilian role of the emperor and to rely for protection on Germanic generals whose loyalties were primarily to him, their patron. A few years ago, in their search for ways to sell more goods, advertising men hit on a new and controversial gimmick. It is a silent, invisible commercial that, the ad men claim, can be rushed past the consumer's conscious mind and planted in his subconscious—and without the consumer's knowledge.
Developed by James Vicary, a research man who studies what makes people buy, this technique relies on the psychological principle of subliminal perception. Scientists tell us that many of the sights coming to our eyes are not consciously "seen". We select only a few for conscious "seeing" and ignore the rest. Actually the discarded impressions are recorded in the brain though they are below the threshold of consciousness.
There's little doubt in Vicary's mind as to the subliminal ad's effectiveness. His proof can be summed up in just two words: sales increase.
In an unidentified movie house not so long ago, unknown audiences saw a curious film program. At the same time, on the same screen on which the film hero was courting the heroine a subliminal projector was flashing its invisible commercials.
"Get popcorn," ordered the commercial for a reported one three-thousandths of a second every five seconds. It announced "Coca-Cola" at the same speed and frequency to other audiences. At the end of a six weeks trial, popcorn sales had gone up 57 percent, Coke sales 18 percent.
Experimental Films. Inc, says the technique is not new. It began research on subliminal perception in 1954. Experimental Films stresses that its equipment was designed for helping problematic students and treating the mentally ill. At NYU two doctors showed twenty women the projected image of an expressionless face. They told the subjects to watch the face for some change of expression. Then they flashed the word angry on the screen at subliminal speeds. Now the women thought the face looked unpleasant. When the word happy was flashed on the screen instead, the subjects thought the woman's facial expression looked much more pleasant.
Subliminal techniques, its promoters believe, are good for more than selling popcorn. Perhaps the process can even be used to sell political candidates, by leaving a favorable impression of the candidate in the minds of the electorates subliminally.
How convincing are these invisible commercials? Skeptical psychologists answer that they aren't anywhere near as effective as the ad men would like to think they are. Nothing has been proven yet scientifically, says a prominent research man. When the first of the two Viking landers touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976, and began to send camera images back to earth, the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not suppress a certain nervous anticipation, like people holding a lottery ticket that they have a one-in-a-million chance of winning. The first photographs that arrived, however, did not contain any evidence of life. What revealed itself to them was merely a barren landscape littered with rocks and boulders. The view resembled nothing so much as a flat section of desert.
The scientists were soon ready to turn their attention from visible life to microorganisms. The twin Viking landers carried three experiments designed to detect current biological activity and one to detect organic compounds, because researchers thought it possible that life had developed on early Mars just as it is thought to have developed on earth, through the gradual chemical evolution of complex organic molecules. To detect biological activity, Martian soil samples were treated with various nutrients that would produce characteristic by-products if life forms were active in the soil. The results from all three experiments were inconclusive. The fourth experiment heated a soil sample to look for signs of organic material, but found none, an unexpected result because at least organic compounds from the bombardment of the Martian surface by meteorites were thought to have been present.
The absence of organic materials, some scientists speculated, was the result of intense ultraviolet radiation penetrating the atmosphere of Mars and destroying organic compounds in the soil. Although Mars' atmosphere was, at one time, rich in carbon dioxide and thus thick enough to protect its surface from the harmful rays of the sun, the carbon dioxide had gradually left the atmosphere and been converted into rocks. This means that even if life had gotten a start on early Mars, it could not have survived the exposure to ultraviolet radiation when the atmosphere thinned.
Despite the disappointing Viking results, there are those who still keep the possibility of life on Mars open. They point out that the Viking data cannot be considered the final word on Martian life because the two landers only sampled two limited—and uninteresting—sites. The Viking landing sites were not chosen for what they might tell of the planet's biology. They were chosen primarily because they appeared to be safe for landing a spacecraft. The landing sites were on parts of the Martian plains that appeared relatively featureless from orbital photographs.
The type of Martian terrain that these researchers suggest may be a possible hiding place because active life has an earthly parallel: the ice-free region of southern Victoria Land, Antarctica, where the temperatures in some dry valleys average below zero. Organisms known as endoliths, a form of blue-green algae that has adapted to this harsh environment, were found living inside certain rocks in these Antarctic valleys. The argument based on this discovery is that if life did exist on early Mars, it is possible that it escaped worsening conditions by similarly seeking refuge in rocks. Skeptics object, however, that Mars in its present state is simply too dry, even compared with Antarctic valleys, to sustain any life whatsoever.
Should Mars eventually prove to be completely barren of life, as some suspect, then this would have a significant impact on the current view of the chemical origin of life. It could be much more difficult to get life started on a planet than scientists thought before the Viking landings.
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