Word: rosenfelds
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University Hall divided its time between disciplining and protecting the student and handling the press (both local and national) so as to minimize the damage to fair Harvard's reputation. The Biochemistry Department had summoned the student, Steven S. Rosenfeld '75, before its members for a 'fessing up, and now caucused furiously to advise the research team on what its course of action should be. The professor involved, David H. Dressler, assistant professor of Biochemistry, and his graduate assistant in the three-man team, Huntington Potter '72, had decided to report to the Administrative Board only the fact of Rosenfeld...
...member and an aspiring graduate student, urged them to save their own skins. Writing letters of retraction to the prestigious journals in which their work had appeared allowed plenty of leeway for casting in ferences and aspersions, and generally pinning the tail of a doomed career on the donkey (Rosenfeld). By immediately dropping all work on transfer factor, a controversial substance postulated in the 1950's for transfering immunity against foreign substances from one animal to another, Dressler and Potter might successfully sever themselves from the scandal...
...scientific-refereeing system and was figuratively, as well as literally, 300 miles away from the experiments and responsibility for their accuracy. But, curiously, Watson also seemed to know enough about the findings to be the first to declare them invalid and untrue, contradicting the testimony of an admittedly disgraced Rosenfeld that they were legitimate, and ignoring conventional scientific folk wisdom that failure to replicate results can as easily result from unknown changes in conditions, materials and preparations as they can from mysterious tamperings...
Rejecting such advice, Dressler and Potter opted for a marty-like stance, issuing a curt, 110-word tentative retraction that avoided all mention of Rosenfeld or their own difficulties, and promising to keep working to get active "preps" of transfer factor during the next three months. They are still working to get a positive "take," though they have met with no success and have moved the focus of their research elsewhere. The chances of vindicating Rosenfeld and justifying two years of work grow dimmer...
...THERE is no logic to the Rosenfeld case in a framework of traditional values, that may be because the organization of scientific research and development in this country isn't exactly logical. Some Harvard administrators attributed his "ill logic" in the recommendations forgeries to the pressures of the pre-med syndrome; some of his friends chalked it up to a success-oriented family background; some of his teachers and fellow students in the Bio Labs, and even Rosenfeld himself, blamed the cumulative effect of spending endless hours in the laboratory and classroom...