Turns out this wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it was an engrossing and informative book nonetheless. Right wingers have been saying for decades that the scientific theory of evolution is wrong, despite having been validated numerous times. A group of fellow travelers have been saying for a couple of decades that science is wrong, that science’s predictions about global warming are not correct. What I was looking for is stories of where science theories have been wrong. Not where application of theories have been wrong. Not just slightly wrong or somewhat wrong, but where science, properly performed, indicated theories and laws that are 180 degrees from what was later proven. Such must be the case somewhere. Perhaps the prescription that hormone therapy be taken by post-menopausal women? I don’t know how that became medically prevalent before being knocked down earlier this decade. Maybe it was proper science, maybe not.
When Science Goes Wrong could more properly be titled When Scientists Go Wrong. Simon LeVay relates twelve stories where scientists royally screwed up. One ignored his own safety: a vulcanologist enters a volcano crater just before it erupts. Some ignored subject safety and ethics: a doctor conducts unauthorized experiments on the brain, speech pathologists try to induce stuttering, gene therapists ignore their own experimental protocols. Some are likely mistakes: a nuclear reactor goes critical, mislabeled bottles result in a drug being labeled as unsafe, a mission to Mars crashes, a dam collapses, a mistaken forecast leaves Englad unprepared for bad weather. Some are outright fraud: a nuclear chemist fakes data to indicate discovery of elements, forensic scientists convict the wrong person. One is both evil and accidental: anthrax for Soviet biological weapons is accidentally released.
In each case LeVay did a fair amount of digging to get to the bottom of the incident. While he didn’t uncover any of the incidents on his own, the book is far more than a recap of newspaper accounts. LeVay interviewed many of the participants and perpetrators. He is (or was) a neuroscientist himself, so he has intimate knowledge of the mindset.
The only warning I have about the book is that LeVay attempts to explain how the theories work but his prose often fails to clarify. For instance, his explanation of how the N.A.S.A. navigated the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft to the red planet really could have used diagrams. The gist of it was that adjustments to the course were off by a factor of five, resulting in the craft being about 50 miles closer to its destination than thought. Rather than gliding into a nice orbit around the planet it crashed to the surface. The angles and velocities that caused this discrepancy to go unnoticed I couldn’t make heads or tails of. It never mattered for the storytelling, but it did mean I didn’t grok all the finer details LeVay wanted to impart.
So while I didn’t quite find my goal, I still got to read about how practical science is not nearly so infallible as scientists like to make it out to be.
Other blogged reviews:
Title: When Science Goes Wrong: Twelve Tales From the Dark Side of Discovery
Author: Simon LeVay
Cover creator: Melissa Jacoby (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Plume / Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 272 p.
Publication date: April 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-452-28932-1
Subject: Errors, scientific — Popular works
Subject: Science — Miscellanea
LC classification: Q172.5.E77L48 2008
