Some people have perfect pitch. Others can shuffle cards with one hand or turn a somersault in midair. Walter Stewart is a virtuoso of a different sort: he has an extraordinary talent for annoying others. "I can't think of anyone who has as many people angry at him as I do," he says matter-of-factly.
Stewart professes to find the anger surprising. Not likely. He and his longtime colleague Ned Feder, both employed as researchers at the National Institutes of Health, have made a career of pursuing fraud in science. No scientist welcomes the message that science--which is, after all, a search for truth--is itself tainted. Coming from these messengers, however, the message is that much less welcome.
Stewart and Feder are, in the words of one representative critic, "zealots" and "vigilantes" and "self-appointed policemen." Of course fraud is wrong and should be punished, skeptics say. The problem isn't Stewart and Feder's crusading but their recklessness and self-righteousness. Washing dirty linen in public is one thing. Gleefully ferreting out laundry from under the neighbor's bed is another. Besides, they ask, if such investigation is necessary, why should these two freelance sleuths do it? Why not leave the chore to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity, which is charged with the responsibility? "It seems to me the entity constituted to look into these things ought to look into them," says J. Edward Rall, an NIH biologist and its former director of intramural research, "and people hired to do research ought to do research."
Stewart and Feder pounce on such objections. They take every opportunity to embrace the doctrine that a free and open debate is essential to the health of science. "I find it preposterous that people ask what I have to do with these cases," Stewart sputters. "It's like my asking what they have to do with the star they're studying. It's a scientist's job to evaluate information, form opinions, and then tender them to the public."
The case in which their opinions were tendered loudest and longest was the David Baltimore affair, a tangle unresolved to this day. The matter centered on allegations of fraud in a paper of which Baltimore-- winner of a Nobel Prize in 1975 for his discovery of the reverse transcriptase enzyme--was a coauthor. Stewart and Feder played a key role in publicizing those charges.
