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Fabulous Science by John Waller, Oxford University Press, £18.99, ISBN 0192804049 Reviewed by Martin Ince

LIKE warfare or sport, science has its great men and women, and its defining moments. But in Fabulous Science John Waller points out that neither the people nor the events are as straightforward as they seem.

He points to two main forms of mischief to which scientists and their mythmakers are prone. Simple data-massaging is the first. And, surprisingly, the perpetrators include big names such as Arthur Eddington, in the classic demonstration of the bending of starlight by gravitation. Also guilty are Louis Pasteur in his proof for the existence of germs, and Robert Millikan in his search for the charge on the electron. So are Frederick Winslow Taylor and other founders of modern management science, whose detailed results do not remotely match the conclusions built on them.

Waller tells these stories well, if a little ponderously. He also omits the more ancient case of apparent fraud by Claudius Ptolemy, and makes a few mistakes. Solar eclipses, for example, do not occur at night. But he makes a strong case that all this inconvenient data was fiddled or suppressed.

His second form of scientific evil-doing is the habit of scientists, or their followers, of tinkering with the facts about what they did, how significant it was and who should have the credit. Most of Waller’s cases are from medical research, where he is clearly at home. Alexander Fleming, for example, is seen to have talked up his role in the development of penicillin massively – Howard Florey deserves a far bigger share of the credit. Here, as elsewhere, prestige, politics and money were key factors. St Mary’s Hospital in London needed Fleming’s lustre to help its fund-raising while Britain, in the throes of the Second World War, needed a hero.

Charles Darwin, according to Waller, was far better-disposed to Lamarckism, the rival to his own notion of evolution by variation and natural selection, than is now generally thought. The work of Gregor Mendel, the founder of inheritance theory, is now seen as part of the Darwinian revolution, but played a more important role during his lifetime as a rival, stressing hybridisation rather than evolution as a source of new species. Waller’s examples are a valuable sideways look at the rolling juggernaut of modern science.