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1 Scientists under Scrutiny: The Centrality of Character in Science-­ Based Controversy When the Datagate controversy was but two weeks old, breast cancer patients and the broader medical establishment were still reeling from the news of Roger Poisson’s tarnished data when auditors uncovered evidence of additional flaws at a second NSABP research site. As if the discovery of falsified data at one site were not damaging enough, the whiff of wider irregularities triggered a crisis of confidence.“Erosion of Public Trust?”asked the Cancer Letter as it reported a discrepant date found on a patient chart at St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal.1 Cindy Pearson, then director of the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), told the Cancer Letter that “to find out that the NSABP can’t even guarantee the quality of recordkeeping and adherence to this trial, this adds insult to injury.”2 Meanwhile, Fran Visco,president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC),explained ,“I think the public trust has been eroded to such an extent that what is needed now is an independent investigation.”3 While National Cancer Institute and NSABP officers tried to assure broader publics that there was “no cause for concern,” the Cancer Letter, Pearson, and Visco attested to a fraying of trust in the institutions charged with overseeing research that affected patients’ lives. Their words indexed the broader issue raised in this book’s introduction: science relies on the testimony of strangers; doubts about the trustworthiness of such testimony undermine confidence in the underlying system and expose the underlying norms of science to broader scrutiny by members of various publics in ways that invoke,challenge,or revise widespread stereotypes about science.4 The terms science and scientist conjure commanding images of purity,precision , and, above all, disinterestedness in the outcomes of research. As philosopher Richard Rorty once observed, “‘science,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘objectivity’ 20 Chapter 1 and ‘truth’ are bound up with one another.”5 “Science,” he explained “is thought of as offering ‘hard,’ ‘objective’ truth.”6 Rorty’s comments reflect widespread stereotypes suggesting that the character of individual scientists should not affect the outcomes of scientific practice. The particular people who populate science,in this view,do not matter so much as their abandonment of human foibles in service of the loftier pursuit of dispassionate, disinterested , and objective knowledge. Science studies scholar Brian Martin captured the thrust of this view when he explained, “Scientific truths are not supposed to be tainted by interests,which is why scientific knowledge is portrayed as rising above the limitations of the system that created it.”7 Although competing images of science certainly abound,Progressive-­ era ideas about science nevertheless consolidated an image of scientists as “models of seriousness, caution, and neutrality, whose detachment guaranteed the reliability of their investigators”—a vision that bears resonance today.8 Indeed, “to argue for the importance, even the centrality, of the personal dimension in late modern technoscience,”writes science studies scholar Steven Shapin, “is directly to confront a sensibility that defines almost all academic, and probably much lay, thought about late modern culture.”9 Given this tendency to view scientists as neutral,objective,and unbiased, it is therefore not surprising that when widespread agreement over knowledge claims exists, the character of science passes without comment. But when the epistemic status of knowledge claims is uncertain, threatened, or tarnished, speculation about the character of science and the character of particular scientists looms large. As experts and nonexperts weigh in on the validity of the disputed knowledge claims, they try to persuade one another about the trustworthiness of scientific arguments, methods, and persons. The rhetoric produced in these exchanges is akin to what sociologist of science Thomas F.Gieryn calls a credibility contest: a “chronic feature of the social scene,”in which “bearers of discrepant truths push their wares wrapped in assertions of objectivity, efficacy, precision, reliability, authenticity, predictability , sincerity, desirability, and tradition.”10 In rhetorical terms, credibility contests involve attempts to convince others of the integrity of individual actions,of the moral uprightness of particular scientists,and whether or not the character of the arguer makes a difference to the status of his or her knowledge claims, thus revealing the snug relationship between trust and truth,character and knowledge,and the language choices that facilitate their construction. During Datagate,scientists,administrators,institutional ­ representatives, activists and advocates,patients,caretakers,and health-­ care workers wrangled over the integrity of NSABP research and, by extension, over the validity Scientists under Scrutiny 21 of...

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