SALON HAS A LENGTHY TREATMENT of the Bell Labs scandal that’s well worth reading.

I think that it’s important to get to the bottom of this, and for people in the field to realize that peer review isn’t a panacea, and certainly isn’t a reason to suspend their own skepticism. On the other hand, I think that the history of responses to science fraud suggests that efforts to create a “cure” may be worse than the disease. Here’s a law review article (based on a chapter in the ethics book I coauthored with Peter W. Morgan, The Appearance of Impropriety) that illustrates that problem. It’s reasonably short, by law review standards.