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  • Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research by Lisa Keränen
  • Colleen Derkatch
Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research. By Lisa Keränen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010; pp. 248. $45.00 cloth.

How we assess the truth of knowledge claims depends largely on the extent to which we trust those who make them. And, as Lisa Keränen argues in Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research, trust, in turn, “depends deeply on perceptions of character” (21): when there is widespread agreement about a scientific claim, we usually take scientists’ objectivity and trustworthiness for granted, but in cases of scientific controversy—when the links between truth and trust have been broken—scientists themselves come under scrutiny. In such cases, Keränen notes, because we tend to trust the testimony of those we deem credible and impartial, “character becomes a mechanism for assessing the integrity of scientific claims” (156). In Scientific Characters, Keränen theorizes the discursive construction of character and illustrates, in turn, how those constructions ultimately shape science in times of crisis.

Keränen bases her study of the rhetorical construction of character on the example of “Datagate,” a very public airing of scientific research misconduct [End Page 786] within the venerated National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP). In June 1990, NSABP investigators discovered during a routine data audit of its trial comparing lumpectomy with mastectomy that several pieces of data had been altered at one of its research sites, Saint-Luc Hospital in Montreal, Canada. On further investigation, NSABP uncovered evidence that Saint-Luc’s principal investigator, Roger Poisson, had systematically falsified patient records for a decade, fudging dates of diagnosis and surgery, for example, to widen the pool of women eligible for the study. Subsequent data reanalysis, minus Poisson’s tainted data, upheld the study’s conclusion that lumpectomy was as safe as mastectomy. But as the scandal unfolded, its scope widened well beyond the research sphere, ultimately leading to the dismissal of both Poisson and the chair of NSABP, Bernard Fisher, and to intense media coverage, congressional hearings, and lawsuits.

After sketching the basics of Datagate’s key players and plot twists, Keränen turns her focus in chapter 1 to establishing a framework for analyzing the rhetorical construction of character within the controversy. She argues that although research in rhetoric of science and related fields has taken us a long way in understanding the role of character in science, that research generally conflates character with ethos, in her view capturing only one dimension of how character shapes debate. As a corrective, Keränen proposes a more robust framework for analyzing character, folding ethos together with the concepts of persona and voice, which she then applies in subsequent chapters to the Datagate controversy.

On the whole, I found Keränen’s tripartite theoretical framework compelling. In her framework, ethos calls on “recognizable communal characteristics, the available norms or values of a group or culture” (32); persona invokes stock or stereotyped public roles and voice addresses how that stock role is performed through “the particular language choices of a speaker, his or her tone or inflection” (33). These three elements collectively add richness to our understanding character as a means of “projecting selves through language” (158), which Keränen then fleshes out through the three central chapters of her book.

In these central chapters, Keränen tracks the competing characterizations that emerged in Datagate, including those of the two scientist-physicians caught up in the scandal, Poisson, who admitted to data fabrication (chapter 2), and Fisher, whose office uncovered the fraud but who nevertheless faced intense scrutiny for his handling of the case (chapter 3). Chapter 4 examines the characterizations that emerged as the scandal moved further downstream into [End Page 787] the public realm, including those of Representative John Dingell, who, in heading the hearings at the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, sought to bring public accountability to the insular world of science, and those of the women whose lives and treatment decisions depended on the tainted research. Each of these chapters draws on a web of well-chosen...

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