Reprint from Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 54, no. 4 (2011) 470-479.
(C) 2011 and published by The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press
(C) 2011 and published by The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press
Thoughts on the History and Ethics of the Proper Attribution and the Misappropriation of Merit.
Henry Gans
Abstract: One would expect that the first to arrive at a new observation, discovery or concept would be properly acknowledged as such. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that someone else recieves the credit. This is not just unfair and unethical, but it also distorts the history of science. In addition, the victims of misattribution are deeply affected by losing not only the recognition of being first, but also the credit, kudos, and other benefits that derive from their contribution. This issue deserves deserves far more attention than it currently receives. It continues to cause much mischief in the most unexpected places and under circumstances that should not be tolerated. This article looks at the consequences of such instances of misattribution in the history of science and argues that researchers should make a stronger effort to expose and rectify such cases. In most instances, all that is required is to double-check the data.
The ethical conduct of research is central to the intregity of universities, where research and graduate education are inseparable-
– C.R. Gunsalis (1976)
In the medical sciences, those who first describe a new feature, whether it’s an anatomical structure, clinical sign or symptom, disease, physiological entity or surgical procedure, often have their discoveries named after them. The insider knows what is meant by such eponymous, abstract designations as Padget’s disease, the Circle of Willis, Pavlov’s dog, Asperger’s syndrome, or the Papanicoulaou test.
This kind of acknowledgment is not just restricted to medicine, it also applies to other fields of science and technology where terms like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the Coriolis effect, Schrödinger’s cat, Poincare’s equation, Beer’s law or the Michelson-Morley experiment define concepts with a distinct meaning that besides their specific content are also historically and factually correct. To have a feature named after its discoverer without any kind of persuasion is a true acknowledgment.
Unfortunately, instances of an unqualified, un justified, or inaccurate attribution also occur. Since the creation and transmission of science and technology results from complex human interactions it’s not uncommon to find, upon closer scrutiny, that the assignment of a new finding may rest on very shaky grounds oreven be patently wrong. Whenever this is the case, one is dealing with the “priority” issue, which can raise perplexing ethical and historical problem that, unfortunately, is rarely acknowledged. Considering the ramifications and consequences of misattribution of scientific discovery, this subject deserves far more attention than it presently receives.
The matter in question deals with creative individuals, and irrespective the source or nature of the creative process, it is clear that some are more successful than others. Either they were born that way or they worked at it with a persistent application. As a consequence, the innovation or new insight, even if only of limited value (by adding very little to our understanding of the world or ourselves), derive their significance from their novelty and originality. Usually, this is immediately recognized by the insider, and the excitement such a discoveries elicit is in direct proportion to its uniqueness, appropriateness and appeal.
The significance of any contribution is in the scope and magnitude of the subject it addresses. The broader or more spectacular, the greater the reward. For example, although the company that profited from his brilliant insight failed to compensate Kary Mullis for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, the wide-ranging repercussions of the discovery, which earned its young, unlikely discoverer a Nobel Prize,, certainly went some way towards making up for the commercial oversight (Mullis 1999). However, there have been notable exceptions, when important original work was simply ignored, or went unrecognized, as in the contributions of Gregor Mendel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent van Gogh.
Mendel published his study of genetics in an obscure Czech journal with a very limited circulation, hence it remained unknown for decades.Henig 2001) J. S. Bach, admired as an talented organist, was for a long time considered an antiquated Baroque composer who lived and worked in a predominantly Rococo period. Most of Dickenson’s almost 1,800 poems remained unpublished in the way she wrote them till only a short time ago. In contrast, van Gogh’s lack of recognition and appreciation during his brief tragic life remains somewhat of an enigma considering that he had quite a few friends, all at the time far more successful as artists than he, but most of whom are presently forgotten (Cooper 1938; Jansen, Luyten and Baker 2007; van Gogh-Bonger 1955).
Other cases are even more puzzling. Where both Kanner and Asperger described a juvenile form of autism, now known as the Asperger syndrome that remained unrecognized for almost half a century, once it became accepted, one wonders why it wasn’t it called the Kanner syndrome, since Kanner’s publication (4 ) preceded Asperger’s (5). This would suggest that the ways of common usage often remain obscure and impenetrable.
Simultaneous discoveries are also not unusual. Both Newton and Leibnitz developed calculus independently of each other, while logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs. More widely acknowledged is the fact that both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace discovered evolution. Oxygen was found by Joseph Priestly and Carl Wilhelm Scheele. In the arts new directions, such as Impressionism (by Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, etc.), Fauve (by Matisse, Derain, Dufy and Vlaminck), Cubism (by Braque and Picasso) or Pop (by Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein et al) represent the almost simultaneous re-evaluations of the artists’ interpretation of reality. It suggests that new developments in the arts and sciences are the products of the intellectual climate of the time in which they were conceived and often arrived at simultaneously in different places.
Besides the correct attribution to a new approach, discovery or insight, there are also the noted mis-attributions. Admittedly, to be the first is quite unique in a world that’s constantly exposed to or searching for new ideas. Consequently, it may be hard to pinpoint its exact origin. Or to determine who deserves credit for it rather than who claimed it, especially if it concerns someone else’s creative endeavor and the culprit gets away with it.
James Mc Neil Whistler, whose work is widely represented in the major art museums, was already a prominent painter in his own time. Yet, his friends cherished him as much for his sharp wit as for his artistry. Oscar Wilde, the young playwright, one of Whistler’s friends and a frequent visitor to his studio would, at times, use some of the painter’s best stories and puns in his plays that were just then beginning to receive favorable notice. One evening, after enjoying one of Whistler’s especially amusing stories, Oscar exclaimed, “By Jove, Jimmy, I wish I had said that!” To which Whistler replied, “Patience, dear Oscar, in due time you’ll get all the credit for it!” Ever since, Wilde’s biographers have been plagued by the problem of how many of his witticisms were originally his or Whistler’s, or someone else’s for that matter (Weintraub 1974). Where Picasso was highly original and innovative, other artists, such as Han van Megeren, John Myatt, (called by Nancy Hall-Duncan (2007), the most ingenious and damaging art con in the world), or Elmyr de Hory, used their considerable skills to recreate and pass of their works as done by Vermeer, Picasso, Dufy or Matisse (Gans 2007; Irving 1969; Jeppson 1971). These fakes were so real that they fooled even the experts and sold for large sums. In fact, at present it is hard to tell to what extent their works are still in important collections or major museums. Of course, this practice isn’t only limited to art. The case of the painted mouse and other well documented instances suggest that fraud remains quite a problem in science as well (Hixson 1976; Judson 2004). Admittedly, these are the extremes. However, cases of lesser scope, involuntary or deliberate, are just as perplexing and at times as disturbing.
For instance, in surgery, the introduction of anesthetics by Crawford Long, who in 1842 incised two abscesses in a patients with the use of ether but didn’t publish his achievement till 1849, goes usually unmentioned. Rather, Horace Wells, a dentist, is often credited as the first to apply anaesthesia. Yet, Wells, who in 1844 used nitrous oxide to put the patient to sleep, failed to prove its effectiveness: the victim woke up in the middle of the dental extraction and ran away screaming. It took a former student and later partner, William Morton, to succeed where Wells had failed. In 1846, Morton demonstrated ether’s effectiveness as an anesthetic to the well known but highly skeptical Boston surgeon, John Collins Warren, by allowing him to remove painlessly a large vascular anomaly in the neck of one Edward Abbott (Wexner 2008). Yet Morton is usually the last person to be acknowledged. Well’s unhappiness about having his primacy denied caused lasting bitterness, and after the death of one of his patients contributed to his suicide (Garrison 1929).
How should we judge William Hunter who often took credit for discoveries that his younger brother, John Hunter had made? In turn, the brothers were trumped first by Alexander Munroe Jr., who published several still unrecorded anatomical structures (such as the tear ducts, the seminiferous ducts, and the lymphatic system) after learning about them, tn 1755, as a student at the Hunter’s Covent Garden lectures and, two years later by Percival Pott, who appropriated John Hunter’s discovery of the development of congenital inguinal hernias after Hunter showed him his anatomical preparations. These priority issues would become one of the major medical scandals of their day. (Kobler 1960; Moore 2005)
Consider also the controversies surrounding the invention of the telephone. French accounts emphasize Charles Bourseul’s efforts (1854), while Italians consider Antonio Meucci as the real inventor (1857). The Germans cite the 1860 telephone by Phillipp Reis, so that Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, who presently receive all the credit for it, were, in 1876, real latecomers. (Schmidhuber 2008). This is just one example of “the effect of nationalistic prejudices that exaggerate the contribution of one’s own country and disparage the efforts of others” (Schmidhuber 2008, p 1759).
In a short but brilliant book, The Birth of the Cell, Henry Harris (1999), the very skillful historian of histology who carefully researched the provenance of every recorded research contribution, calls attention to numerous priorities that were wrongly assigned over the years in just a single small area of histology and embryology. One striking example that he discusses deals with the pioneering efforts and our basic understanding of the cell contributed by Robert Remak, a by now scarcely remembered Polish Jew. Almost all the credit for Remak’s work instead went to Rudolph Virchow, a pathologist known for his pioneering work on thrombosis who, because of his celebrity status and the right pedigree, was readily able to adopt Remak’s work even though initially he held a totally opposite view. Harris, one of those rare persons who has delved deep into the original histological literature attributed these lapses in ethics to chauvinism, personal animus, and frank racism.
In 1843, Oliver Wendel Homes published a paper “On the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” that met with great opposition and antagonism. However, he fared much better than Ignaz Semmelweiss who is actually credited for discovering the relationship between the high incidence of puerperal fever and obstetric mortality in Vienna’s Algemeine Krankenhaus. Semmelweis noted the proximity of the autopsy ward and advocated hand washing when he then proved in 1848 the infection and mortality. He subsequently met with so much hostility that it drove him insane and to an early death (Garrison 1929).
And how to regard Jouffray d’Abbans, the french marquis who, in 1775, developed the first steamboat? In addition to arriving at the original concept, the next year he also built the first prototype.. Seven years later, he introduced a paddle steamer that traveled from Lyon up the Saône river against the current. Yet, his subsequent claim that he had ‘reconciled fire and water’ met with such derision that it crushed his spirit and he died in the poorhouse. Surprisingly, John Fitch, whose steamboat operated on the Delaware River in 1787, also remains unacknowledged. How does one reconcile this with Robert Fulton’s steamship, which in 1803 was immediately and widely acclaimed as being a first?
Today, few people know of Louis Mouillard, who in 1865, in Algiers, flew 138 feet. His 1881 book, The Empire of Air; Essay on Ornithology as Applied to Aviation, would become the standard text for later pioneers. From his correspondence with Octave Chanute, who wrote Progress in Flying Machines (1894) we learn that Mouilliard had alreadydescribed the screw to lift and propel the airplane in 1890, and that he helped build the first plane for the Wright brothers (in 1896).Mouillard, who at the time lived in Cairo, wrote in 1890, “I’ve ideas which in more active hands than mine would be quickly executed and made productive, beginning with aviation which through you I give to the world.” Or of Otto Lilienthal (who was killed in 1891 during one of his flights) or Chanuke, whose contributions to aviation are rarely mentioned and hence barely remembered. Where several powered flight were recorded prior to 1900– Lawrence Hargrave, in 189 flew over a distance of 77 feet, Clement Adler, in 1897, flew three hundred meters while August Moore Herring, in 1898, flew 343 feet – presently, all the credit goes to the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio. Their first flight, on December 17, 1903, so distinguished them that today even every school child knows their names.
Confronted with a wealth of new information that’s usually immediately assimilated, it’s easy to forget such relevant details as where the new invention or insight originated, and how, why, or when it was made, or if the creditt went to the right person. So it’s not at all surprising that someone else simply adopted such a discovery after reading or hearing about it. Thus, over the years, despite the fact that there is so much riding on it, the original contributor of a new breakthrough is at times only selectively acknowledged. Moreover, attempts to trace the origins of a specific pioneering innovation many years later may well be almost impossible. Thus, one is justified to ask, was the anatomist Andreas Vesalius really the genius that Henri Sigerist (1933), the noted medical historian, claimed he was -- or was he merely an infamous fraud, as William Ivens (1952), the former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has argued rather convincingly? While this question remains unsolved, the claim by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier that he “established the true nature of combustion,” is no longer credible, Although still generally regarded as the first, recent evidence indicates that he learned about it after reading John Mayow’s book, De Sal Nitro, which already had described the process in 1654, a fact that he conveniently failed to acknowledge but that a very astute and persistent investigator could clearly and with convincing, irrefutable evidence establish, turning this famous Frenchman into a fraud (Gonzales 1989).
Usually, few are aware of what really took place between one person’s creative insight and its general acceptance. It is not uncommon for someone working in the same field as the discoverer to pick up a promising new view, adopt it, help shape it and then run with it, without appearing to break the Eighth Commandment. In fact, quite a few big names have jumped on a bandwagon and received the credit for it. Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first human heart transplantations, was accused of it. Many considered his actions outrageous, calling his integrity in question and designated him a shameless self-promoter. Yet with two patients surviving longer than expected, he helped, almost single handedly, open a whole new field of surgery. He never denied that he had learned the technique from ‘an old friend’, which is not the same as passing off other people’s unacknowledged new insight as his own (Barnard and Pepper 1969; Hawthorne 1968). Yet, clearly, the Oscar Wilde phenomenon is far from unique. Almost anyone who has done original work has experienced it in one form or another.
In recent years one has become increasingly aware of attempts by some industrial giant to pirate – often by their bold and unfettered intimidation – the invention of a new concept by a tiny start-up company or by a single individual. A claim to that effect may be hard to prove, and accusing someone of the practice and being unable to make the allegation stick may have serious legal consequences. A case in point is that of the well-known physicist Oreste Piccioni, who asserted that during a visit to his lab, he suggested to Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain the use of magnets to guide a beam of antiprotons to instruments that could detect them. Their application of this principle brought them the Nobel prize (Shapley 1972).
Usually, a new approach to an old problem is readily recognized and the person introducing it properly acknowledged. However, when this process is corrupted, what can be done about it? Often, the issue leads to litigation to obtain the recognition one is entitled to.This problem is likely to become more prevalent as the fields of science, technology and the arts become more crowded and the wronged more determined to assert their rights. Who can blame them for wanting to receive the recognition they deserve, a proper assignment in the text and history books, and the benefits that derive from it – the kudos, the financial rewards, the power, and the satisfaction that a new insight provides?
If an alleged inappropriate appropriation encroaches on a person’s intellectual property rights and the case is taken to court, it usually results in a long, painful, and very costly battle of which the outcome is often far from certain. Things do not always turn out as well as in the case of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the varying rate window wiper that the Ford Motor Company appropriated. Kearns challenge of Ford lead to a prolonged legal proceeding, during which the inventor initially had to be institutionalized, but which eventually resulted in Ke4arns being awarded after many years $30 million. (His story was made into a movie, Flash of Genius, which was released in 2008).
But what about those instances where there are no legal remedies, when little or nothing can be done about it, where there is no recourse, and the victim of this unhappy circumstance is left to manage the unwarranted insult and injustice in his own private way? This is far from unusual, and the repercussions of such a situation may be devastating. Robert Mayer, a very bright ship’s physician, was the first to postulate the law of the conservation of energy , or the first law of thermodynamics (Mayer 1842). However, he was upstaged five years later by the far more renown scientists, Hermann von Helmholz, and James Joule, who, unfortunately, would receive all the credit for it.(Smith 1998). This so affected the poor doctor that he attempted suicide, spent years in an asylum, and remained, after his release, a broken man.
This may be hard to understand but some achievers -- despite, or just because of their unique ability to think outside the box, may well react differently to a perceived insult after their right to claim priority is rudely repudiated. Hence, the profound sense of injustice and discrimination that the few experience, and the persistent sense of frustration, anger and helplessness can be so overwhelming that in due course the troubled mind may derail. The victims (men like Wells, Semmelweis, d’ Abbans, Kearns, Mayer, and who knows whoever else) can lose sight of what was once important and end up destroyed.
Clearly, in science, priority has been and remains an important issue. And for a good reason. It is in the nature of the scientific endeavor to formulate and solve problems. Others may be working in the same field, especially today when so many are involved in research. Only one will be first. It’s a race. James D. Watson and Francis Crick realized this (and in so doing neglected to mention the name of poor Rosalind Franklin) when they made sure they were the first to publish the structure of DNA (Sayre 1975; Watson 1968). They knew the rewards would be enormous.
As Susan Allport explains it in her 1986 book Explorers of the Black Box:
“In a world in which the state of knowledge is constantly changing, all a scientist really has to his credit is priority, the fact that he found a certain phenomenon first; when that priority is not recognized, his life blood is taken away. Also, since the history of science and the advancement of knowledge depends not only on the actual performance of experiments but also on whether the experiments are remembered, a conscious failure by one investigator to cite another’s work, may be seen as an attempt to write history in such a way that the contributions and influence of another scientist are excluded.”
References:
Allport, S. 1986, Explorers of the black box: The search for the cellular basis for memory, Scranton: Norton.
Aspercher, H. 1944. Die Autistischen Psychopathen im Kindesalter”, Arch f#SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95r Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 117 : 76.
Barnard, C and C.B.Pepper, 1969 One life, Macmillan, Toronto, 1969,
Barr, Jr., A.H.1946 Picasso: Fifty years of his art, New York: Museum of Modern Art..
Bianchi, E.D. 1972. The life and letters of Emily Dickinson. Cheshire:Bilio and Tannen.
Cooper, D. 1938. Van Gogh on arts and artists:Letters to Emile Bernard. New York : Museum of Modern Art
Gans, H. 2007. Caveat Emptor, Trafford, Victoria BC, 2007
Garrison, F.H. 1929 An introduction to the history of medicine. Philadelphia: Saunders
Gonzales, E. 1989. On Lavoisier’s discovery claim. Am. Bookman, Oct 23.
Gunsalis, C.K. 1976. Ethics: Sending out a message. Science 276:335.
Hall-Duncan, N. 2007. Fakes and forgers. The art of deception. Greenwich, CO: Bruce Museum.
Harris, H.1999. The life of the cell. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Hawthorne, P. 1968. The transplanted heart. Chicao: Rand McNally.
Hening, R. 2001. The monk in the garden, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Hixson, J.1976 The patchwork mouse, Politics and intrigue in the campaign to conquer cancer. New York: Doubleday.
Holmes, O.W. 1842-43. On the contaginousness of puerperal fever. N Engl Q J Med 1:503-30
Irving, C. 1969.: Fake, New York: Mc Graw Hill.
Ivens, W.M. 1952. What about the “Fabrica” of Vesalius? in Three Vesalian Essays, New York: Macmillan.
Jansen, L, H Luyten, and N Baker. 2007. Vincent van Gogh –
Painted with words: The letters to Emile Bernard, Catalogue of exhibition at the Morgan Library, Sept 2007 – Jan 2008, New York: Rizzoli
Jeppson, L. 1971. Fabulous Frauds, London, Arlington Books.
Judson, H.F. 2004: The great betrayal: Fraud in science, New York, Harcourt.
Kanner,L. 1943. Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, Nervous Child 2: 217
Kobler, J. 1960. The reluctant surgeon. Pleasantville, NY: Akadine Press.
Mayer, R.J. 1842. Bemerkungen #SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95ber die Kräfte der unbelebten Natur, Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie 42: 243.
Moore, W. 2005. The Knife Man,. New York. Broadway Publishing.
Mullis,, K. 1999. Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Richardson, J. 2007. A life of Picasso, The triumphant years, 1917-1932, New York: Knopf.
Sayre, A. 1975. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: Norton.
Schmidhuber, J. 2008.The last inventor of the telephone. Science 319:1759.
Semmelweis, I.P. 1894. H#SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95chst wichtige Erfärungen #SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95ber die
Aetologie der Gebaranstalten epidemischen Puerperfieber. Ztschr d k k Geselsch d Aertze 64:242.
Shapley. D. 1972 Nobelists: Piccioni lawsuit raises question about 1959 prize, Science 176:1405-06.
Sigerist, H.E. 1933. The great doctors, , Scranton:Norton.
Smith, C. 1998. The science of energy: A cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
van Gogh-Bonger, J. 1955. Verzamelde brieven van Vincent van Gogh, 2 vols. Amsterdam Wereld-Biblioteek.
Watson, J.D. The Double Helix, New York: Atheneum.
Weintraub, S. 1974.: Whistler, A Biography, New York:Weybright and Talle.
Wexner, S.D. 2008. Anesthesia’s captivating and controversial beginnings. Gen Surg News, (Oct.):10
Addendum
Copy of a letter sent to the Editor of the Journal of the American Surgical Society, in Nov 2009.
As an early contributor to the Journal of the American Surgical Society’s predecessor (after Dr Martin, the editor of Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, asked me, in 1956, to review selected articles from the foreign surgical literature, abstracts that he then published in SG&O), and of many subsequent publications in other journals, one can only hope that you will indeed stand by the statement you made in the interview that appeared in the Bulletin of ACS (of Oct 2009) on the uniqueness of the J Am Coll Surg. For that could not be said of its predecessor in its later years. In fact, I have to side with Richard Smith (Lancet 355:849, 200) and Richard Horton (Lancet 347:984, 1996) where they stated that the problem with surgical journals would appear to be the paucity of suitable surgical material that’s published and a deficient editorial oversight. For how else to explain some of the obvious redundancies? Take for instance the example I’m most familiar with. When I still received SGO (I stopped reading it when I reached 80), every few years an other article appeared in the journal on the anatomy of the liver (on casual examination I found Lanois et al SGO 174 (1992) 7, Czerniak et al: SGO 1777 (1993) 3003, Strasberg J Am Coll Surg 184 (1997) 413, Blumgart etal J Am Coll Surg 187 (1998) 417, Batagnani J Am Coll Surg 190 (2000) 631 and who knows how many I’ve missed) that dealt specifically with the anatomy of the lobar and segmental Glissonian structures, often taken verbatim from other sources but without referring to them. In fact, the quoted examples were far less detailed than the original publications that have been in the public domain for years. What is so special about the liver that its anatomy required a revisit year after year? As mentioned recently in the Lancet this and other features don’t reflect well on the quality of our surgical journals. Isn’t about time they stop repeating themselves?
I take issue with the remarks you made during the interview that you gave to the Bulletin. Despite the sweat equity you ascribe to the “success’ of the journal, there are several potential areas for improvement, areas that are presently often neglected. First, how often is a negative peer review, prior to the rejection of a paper, submitted to a rough evaluation for bias? (see William C Shoemaker:”On the editorial opinion and responsibility.” Surg 72(1972): 490 or my correspondence with the Lancet; 360 (2002): 805). Second, how often is an author asked for a statement of omission of important related, pertinent, preceding information in the literature?
Apropos these two points, it raises the priority issue, an important ethical problem that, unfortunately, is often neglected as the above quoted examples would indicate.
Henry Gans
Abstract: One would expect that the first to arrive at a new observation, discovery or concept would be properly acknowledged as such. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that someone else recieves the credit. This is not just unfair and unethical, but it also distorts the history of science. In addition, the victims of misattribution are deeply affected by losing not only the recognition of being first, but also the credit, kudos, and other benefits that derive from their contribution. This issue deserves deserves far more attention than it currently receives. It continues to cause much mischief in the most unexpected places and under circumstances that should not be tolerated. This article looks at the consequences of such instances of misattribution in the history of science and argues that researchers should make a stronger effort to expose and rectify such cases. In most instances, all that is required is to double-check the data.
The ethical conduct of research is central to the intregity of universities, where research and graduate education are inseparable-
– C.R. Gunsalis (1976)
In the medical sciences, those who first describe a new feature, whether it’s an anatomical structure, clinical sign or symptom, disease, physiological entity or surgical procedure, often have their discoveries named after them. The insider knows what is meant by such eponymous, abstract designations as Padget’s disease, the Circle of Willis, Pavlov’s dog, Asperger’s syndrome, or the Papanicoulaou test.
This kind of acknowledgment is not just restricted to medicine, it also applies to other fields of science and technology where terms like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the Coriolis effect, Schrödinger’s cat, Poincare’s equation, Beer’s law or the Michelson-Morley experiment define concepts with a distinct meaning that besides their specific content are also historically and factually correct. To have a feature named after its discoverer without any kind of persuasion is a true acknowledgment.
Unfortunately, instances of an unqualified, un justified, or inaccurate attribution also occur. Since the creation and transmission of science and technology results from complex human interactions it’s not uncommon to find, upon closer scrutiny, that the assignment of a new finding may rest on very shaky grounds oreven be patently wrong. Whenever this is the case, one is dealing with the “priority” issue, which can raise perplexing ethical and historical problem that, unfortunately, is rarely acknowledged. Considering the ramifications and consequences of misattribution of scientific discovery, this subject deserves far more attention than it presently receives.
The matter in question deals with creative individuals, and irrespective the source or nature of the creative process, it is clear that some are more successful than others. Either they were born that way or they worked at it with a persistent application. As a consequence, the innovation or new insight, even if only of limited value (by adding very little to our understanding of the world or ourselves), derive their significance from their novelty and originality. Usually, this is immediately recognized by the insider, and the excitement such a discoveries elicit is in direct proportion to its uniqueness, appropriateness and appeal.
The significance of any contribution is in the scope and magnitude of the subject it addresses. The broader or more spectacular, the greater the reward. For example, although the company that profited from his brilliant insight failed to compensate Kary Mullis for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, the wide-ranging repercussions of the discovery, which earned its young, unlikely discoverer a Nobel Prize,, certainly went some way towards making up for the commercial oversight (Mullis 1999). However, there have been notable exceptions, when important original work was simply ignored, or went unrecognized, as in the contributions of Gregor Mendel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent van Gogh.
Mendel published his study of genetics in an obscure Czech journal with a very limited circulation, hence it remained unknown for decades.Henig 2001) J. S. Bach, admired as an talented organist, was for a long time considered an antiquated Baroque composer who lived and worked in a predominantly Rococo period. Most of Dickenson’s almost 1,800 poems remained unpublished in the way she wrote them till only a short time ago. In contrast, van Gogh’s lack of recognition and appreciation during his brief tragic life remains somewhat of an enigma considering that he had quite a few friends, all at the time far more successful as artists than he, but most of whom are presently forgotten (Cooper 1938; Jansen, Luyten and Baker 2007; van Gogh-Bonger 1955).
Other cases are even more puzzling. Where both Kanner and Asperger described a juvenile form of autism, now known as the Asperger syndrome that remained unrecognized for almost half a century, once it became accepted, one wonders why it wasn’t it called the Kanner syndrome, since Kanner’s publication (4 ) preceded Asperger’s (5). This would suggest that the ways of common usage often remain obscure and impenetrable.
Simultaneous discoveries are also not unusual. Both Newton and Leibnitz developed calculus independently of each other, while logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs. More widely acknowledged is the fact that both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace discovered evolution. Oxygen was found by Joseph Priestly and Carl Wilhelm Scheele. In the arts new directions, such as Impressionism (by Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, etc.), Fauve (by Matisse, Derain, Dufy and Vlaminck), Cubism (by Braque and Picasso) or Pop (by Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein et al) represent the almost simultaneous re-evaluations of the artists’ interpretation of reality. It suggests that new developments in the arts and sciences are the products of the intellectual climate of the time in which they were conceived and often arrived at simultaneously in different places.
Besides the correct attribution to a new approach, discovery or insight, there are also the noted mis-attributions. Admittedly, to be the first is quite unique in a world that’s constantly exposed to or searching for new ideas. Consequently, it may be hard to pinpoint its exact origin. Or to determine who deserves credit for it rather than who claimed it, especially if it concerns someone else’s creative endeavor and the culprit gets away with it.
James Mc Neil Whistler, whose work is widely represented in the major art museums, was already a prominent painter in his own time. Yet, his friends cherished him as much for his sharp wit as for his artistry. Oscar Wilde, the young playwright, one of Whistler’s friends and a frequent visitor to his studio would, at times, use some of the painter’s best stories and puns in his plays that were just then beginning to receive favorable notice. One evening, after enjoying one of Whistler’s especially amusing stories, Oscar exclaimed, “By Jove, Jimmy, I wish I had said that!” To which Whistler replied, “Patience, dear Oscar, in due time you’ll get all the credit for it!” Ever since, Wilde’s biographers have been plagued by the problem of how many of his witticisms were originally his or Whistler’s, or someone else’s for that matter (Weintraub 1974). Where Picasso was highly original and innovative, other artists, such as Han van Megeren, John Myatt, (called by Nancy Hall-Duncan (2007), the most ingenious and damaging art con in the world), or Elmyr de Hory, used their considerable skills to recreate and pass of their works as done by Vermeer, Picasso, Dufy or Matisse (Gans 2007; Irving 1969; Jeppson 1971). These fakes were so real that they fooled even the experts and sold for large sums. In fact, at present it is hard to tell to what extent their works are still in important collections or major museums. Of course, this practice isn’t only limited to art. The case of the painted mouse and other well documented instances suggest that fraud remains quite a problem in science as well (Hixson 1976; Judson 2004). Admittedly, these are the extremes. However, cases of lesser scope, involuntary or deliberate, are just as perplexing and at times as disturbing.
For instance, in surgery, the introduction of anesthetics by Crawford Long, who in 1842 incised two abscesses in a patients with the use of ether but didn’t publish his achievement till 1849, goes usually unmentioned. Rather, Horace Wells, a dentist, is often credited as the first to apply anaesthesia. Yet, Wells, who in 1844 used nitrous oxide to put the patient to sleep, failed to prove its effectiveness: the victim woke up in the middle of the dental extraction and ran away screaming. It took a former student and later partner, William Morton, to succeed where Wells had failed. In 1846, Morton demonstrated ether’s effectiveness as an anesthetic to the well known but highly skeptical Boston surgeon, John Collins Warren, by allowing him to remove painlessly a large vascular anomaly in the neck of one Edward Abbott (Wexner 2008). Yet Morton is usually the last person to be acknowledged. Well’s unhappiness about having his primacy denied caused lasting bitterness, and after the death of one of his patients contributed to his suicide (Garrison 1929).
How should we judge William Hunter who often took credit for discoveries that his younger brother, John Hunter had made? In turn, the brothers were trumped first by Alexander Munroe Jr., who published several still unrecorded anatomical structures (such as the tear ducts, the seminiferous ducts, and the lymphatic system) after learning about them, tn 1755, as a student at the Hunter’s Covent Garden lectures and, two years later by Percival Pott, who appropriated John Hunter’s discovery of the development of congenital inguinal hernias after Hunter showed him his anatomical preparations. These priority issues would become one of the major medical scandals of their day. (Kobler 1960; Moore 2005)
Consider also the controversies surrounding the invention of the telephone. French accounts emphasize Charles Bourseul’s efforts (1854), while Italians consider Antonio Meucci as the real inventor (1857). The Germans cite the 1860 telephone by Phillipp Reis, so that Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, who presently receive all the credit for it, were, in 1876, real latecomers. (Schmidhuber 2008). This is just one example of “the effect of nationalistic prejudices that exaggerate the contribution of one’s own country and disparage the efforts of others” (Schmidhuber 2008, p 1759).
In a short but brilliant book, The Birth of the Cell, Henry Harris (1999), the very skillful historian of histology who carefully researched the provenance of every recorded research contribution, calls attention to numerous priorities that were wrongly assigned over the years in just a single small area of histology and embryology. One striking example that he discusses deals with the pioneering efforts and our basic understanding of the cell contributed by Robert Remak, a by now scarcely remembered Polish Jew. Almost all the credit for Remak’s work instead went to Rudolph Virchow, a pathologist known for his pioneering work on thrombosis who, because of his celebrity status and the right pedigree, was readily able to adopt Remak’s work even though initially he held a totally opposite view. Harris, one of those rare persons who has delved deep into the original histological literature attributed these lapses in ethics to chauvinism, personal animus, and frank racism.
In 1843, Oliver Wendel Homes published a paper “On the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” that met with great opposition and antagonism. However, he fared much better than Ignaz Semmelweiss who is actually credited for discovering the relationship between the high incidence of puerperal fever and obstetric mortality in Vienna’s Algemeine Krankenhaus. Semmelweis noted the proximity of the autopsy ward and advocated hand washing when he then proved in 1848 the infection and mortality. He subsequently met with so much hostility that it drove him insane and to an early death (Garrison 1929).
And how to regard Jouffray d’Abbans, the french marquis who, in 1775, developed the first steamboat? In addition to arriving at the original concept, the next year he also built the first prototype.. Seven years later, he introduced a paddle steamer that traveled from Lyon up the Saône river against the current. Yet, his subsequent claim that he had ‘reconciled fire and water’ met with such derision that it crushed his spirit and he died in the poorhouse. Surprisingly, John Fitch, whose steamboat operated on the Delaware River in 1787, also remains unacknowledged. How does one reconcile this with Robert Fulton’s steamship, which in 1803 was immediately and widely acclaimed as being a first?
Today, few people know of Louis Mouillard, who in 1865, in Algiers, flew 138 feet. His 1881 book, The Empire of Air; Essay on Ornithology as Applied to Aviation, would become the standard text for later pioneers. From his correspondence with Octave Chanute, who wrote Progress in Flying Machines (1894) we learn that Mouilliard had alreadydescribed the screw to lift and propel the airplane in 1890, and that he helped build the first plane for the Wright brothers (in 1896).Mouillard, who at the time lived in Cairo, wrote in 1890, “I’ve ideas which in more active hands than mine would be quickly executed and made productive, beginning with aviation which through you I give to the world.” Or of Otto Lilienthal (who was killed in 1891 during one of his flights) or Chanuke, whose contributions to aviation are rarely mentioned and hence barely remembered. Where several powered flight were recorded prior to 1900– Lawrence Hargrave, in 189 flew over a distance of 77 feet, Clement Adler, in 1897, flew three hundred meters while August Moore Herring, in 1898, flew 343 feet – presently, all the credit goes to the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio. Their first flight, on December 17, 1903, so distinguished them that today even every school child knows their names.
Confronted with a wealth of new information that’s usually immediately assimilated, it’s easy to forget such relevant details as where the new invention or insight originated, and how, why, or when it was made, or if the creditt went to the right person. So it’s not at all surprising that someone else simply adopted such a discovery after reading or hearing about it. Thus, over the years, despite the fact that there is so much riding on it, the original contributor of a new breakthrough is at times only selectively acknowledged. Moreover, attempts to trace the origins of a specific pioneering innovation many years later may well be almost impossible. Thus, one is justified to ask, was the anatomist Andreas Vesalius really the genius that Henri Sigerist (1933), the noted medical historian, claimed he was -- or was he merely an infamous fraud, as William Ivens (1952), the former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has argued rather convincingly? While this question remains unsolved, the claim by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier that he “established the true nature of combustion,” is no longer credible, Although still generally regarded as the first, recent evidence indicates that he learned about it after reading John Mayow’s book, De Sal Nitro, which already had described the process in 1654, a fact that he conveniently failed to acknowledge but that a very astute and persistent investigator could clearly and with convincing, irrefutable evidence establish, turning this famous Frenchman into a fraud (Gonzales 1989).
Usually, few are aware of what really took place between one person’s creative insight and its general acceptance. It is not uncommon for someone working in the same field as the discoverer to pick up a promising new view, adopt it, help shape it and then run with it, without appearing to break the Eighth Commandment. In fact, quite a few big names have jumped on a bandwagon and received the credit for it. Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first human heart transplantations, was accused of it. Many considered his actions outrageous, calling his integrity in question and designated him a shameless self-promoter. Yet with two patients surviving longer than expected, he helped, almost single handedly, open a whole new field of surgery. He never denied that he had learned the technique from ‘an old friend’, which is not the same as passing off other people’s unacknowledged new insight as his own (Barnard and Pepper 1969; Hawthorne 1968). Yet, clearly, the Oscar Wilde phenomenon is far from unique. Almost anyone who has done original work has experienced it in one form or another.
In recent years one has become increasingly aware of attempts by some industrial giant to pirate – often by their bold and unfettered intimidation – the invention of a new concept by a tiny start-up company or by a single individual. A claim to that effect may be hard to prove, and accusing someone of the practice and being unable to make the allegation stick may have serious legal consequences. A case in point is that of the well-known physicist Oreste Piccioni, who asserted that during a visit to his lab, he suggested to Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain the use of magnets to guide a beam of antiprotons to instruments that could detect them. Their application of this principle brought them the Nobel prize (Shapley 1972).
Usually, a new approach to an old problem is readily recognized and the person introducing it properly acknowledged. However, when this process is corrupted, what can be done about it? Often, the issue leads to litigation to obtain the recognition one is entitled to.This problem is likely to become more prevalent as the fields of science, technology and the arts become more crowded and the wronged more determined to assert their rights. Who can blame them for wanting to receive the recognition they deserve, a proper assignment in the text and history books, and the benefits that derive from it – the kudos, the financial rewards, the power, and the satisfaction that a new insight provides?
If an alleged inappropriate appropriation encroaches on a person’s intellectual property rights and the case is taken to court, it usually results in a long, painful, and very costly battle of which the outcome is often far from certain. Things do not always turn out as well as in the case of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the varying rate window wiper that the Ford Motor Company appropriated. Kearns challenge of Ford lead to a prolonged legal proceeding, during which the inventor initially had to be institutionalized, but which eventually resulted in Ke4arns being awarded after many years $30 million. (His story was made into a movie, Flash of Genius, which was released in 2008).
But what about those instances where there are no legal remedies, when little or nothing can be done about it, where there is no recourse, and the victim of this unhappy circumstance is left to manage the unwarranted insult and injustice in his own private way? This is far from unusual, and the repercussions of such a situation may be devastating. Robert Mayer, a very bright ship’s physician, was the first to postulate the law of the conservation of energy , or the first law of thermodynamics (Mayer 1842). However, he was upstaged five years later by the far more renown scientists, Hermann von Helmholz, and James Joule, who, unfortunately, would receive all the credit for it.(Smith 1998). This so affected the poor doctor that he attempted suicide, spent years in an asylum, and remained, after his release, a broken man.
This may be hard to understand but some achievers -- despite, or just because of their unique ability to think outside the box, may well react differently to a perceived insult after their right to claim priority is rudely repudiated. Hence, the profound sense of injustice and discrimination that the few experience, and the persistent sense of frustration, anger and helplessness can be so overwhelming that in due course the troubled mind may derail. The victims (men like Wells, Semmelweis, d’ Abbans, Kearns, Mayer, and who knows whoever else) can lose sight of what was once important and end up destroyed.
Clearly, in science, priority has been and remains an important issue. And for a good reason. It is in the nature of the scientific endeavor to formulate and solve problems. Others may be working in the same field, especially today when so many are involved in research. Only one will be first. It’s a race. James D. Watson and Francis Crick realized this (and in so doing neglected to mention the name of poor Rosalind Franklin) when they made sure they were the first to publish the structure of DNA (Sayre 1975; Watson 1968). They knew the rewards would be enormous.
As Susan Allport explains it in her 1986 book Explorers of the Black Box:
“In a world in which the state of knowledge is constantly changing, all a scientist really has to his credit is priority, the fact that he found a certain phenomenon first; when that priority is not recognized, his life blood is taken away. Also, since the history of science and the advancement of knowledge depends not only on the actual performance of experiments but also on whether the experiments are remembered, a conscious failure by one investigator to cite another’s work, may be seen as an attempt to write history in such a way that the contributions and influence of another scientist are excluded.”
References:
Allport, S. 1986, Explorers of the black box: The search for the cellular basis for memory, Scranton: Norton.
Aspercher, H. 1944. Die Autistischen Psychopathen im Kindesalter”, Arch f#SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95r Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 117 : 76.
Barnard, C and C.B.Pepper, 1969 One life, Macmillan, Toronto, 1969,
Barr, Jr., A.H.1946 Picasso: Fifty years of his art, New York: Museum of Modern Art..
Bianchi, E.D. 1972. The life and letters of Emily Dickinson. Cheshire:Bilio and Tannen.
Cooper, D. 1938. Van Gogh on arts and artists:Letters to Emile Bernard. New York : Museum of Modern Art
Gans, H. 2007. Caveat Emptor, Trafford, Victoria BC, 2007
Garrison, F.H. 1929 An introduction to the history of medicine. Philadelphia: Saunders
Gonzales, E. 1989. On Lavoisier’s discovery claim. Am. Bookman, Oct 23.
Gunsalis, C.K. 1976. Ethics: Sending out a message. Science 276:335.
Hall-Duncan, N. 2007. Fakes and forgers. The art of deception. Greenwich, CO: Bruce Museum.
Harris, H.1999. The life of the cell. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Hawthorne, P. 1968. The transplanted heart. Chicao: Rand McNally.
Hening, R. 2001. The monk in the garden, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Hixson, J.1976 The patchwork mouse, Politics and intrigue in the campaign to conquer cancer. New York: Doubleday.
Holmes, O.W. 1842-43. On the contaginousness of puerperal fever. N Engl Q J Med 1:503-30
Irving, C. 1969.: Fake, New York: Mc Graw Hill.
Ivens, W.M. 1952. What about the “Fabrica” of Vesalius? in Three Vesalian Essays, New York: Macmillan.
Jansen, L, H Luyten, and N Baker. 2007. Vincent van Gogh –
Painted with words: The letters to Emile Bernard, Catalogue of exhibition at the Morgan Library, Sept 2007 – Jan 2008, New York: Rizzoli
Jeppson, L. 1971. Fabulous Frauds, London, Arlington Books.
Judson, H.F. 2004: The great betrayal: Fraud in science, New York, Harcourt.
Kanner,L. 1943. Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, Nervous Child 2: 217
Kobler, J. 1960. The reluctant surgeon. Pleasantville, NY: Akadine Press.
Mayer, R.J. 1842. Bemerkungen #SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95ber die Kräfte der unbelebten Natur, Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie 42: 243.
Moore, W. 2005. The Knife Man,. New York. Broadway Publishing.
Mullis,, K. 1999. Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Richardson, J. 2007. A life of Picasso, The triumphant years, 1917-1932, New York: Knopf.
Sayre, A. 1975. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: Norton.
Schmidhuber, J. 2008.The last inventor of the telephone. Science 319:1759.
Semmelweis, I.P. 1894. H#SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95chst wichtige Erfärungen #SYMBOL \f "Symbol"95ber die
Aetologie der Gebaranstalten epidemischen Puerperfieber. Ztschr d k k Geselsch d Aertze 64:242.
Shapley. D. 1972 Nobelists: Piccioni lawsuit raises question about 1959 prize, Science 176:1405-06.
Sigerist, H.E. 1933. The great doctors, , Scranton:Norton.
Smith, C. 1998. The science of energy: A cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
van Gogh-Bonger, J. 1955. Verzamelde brieven van Vincent van Gogh, 2 vols. Amsterdam Wereld-Biblioteek.
Watson, J.D. The Double Helix, New York: Atheneum.
Weintraub, S. 1974.: Whistler, A Biography, New York:Weybright and Talle.
Wexner, S.D. 2008. Anesthesia’s captivating and controversial beginnings. Gen Surg News, (Oct.):10
Addendum
Copy of a letter sent to the Editor of the Journal of the American Surgical Society, in Nov 2009.
As an early contributor to the Journal of the American Surgical Society’s predecessor (after Dr Martin, the editor of Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, asked me, in 1956, to review selected articles from the foreign surgical literature, abstracts that he then published in SG&O), and of many subsequent publications in other journals, one can only hope that you will indeed stand by the statement you made in the interview that appeared in the Bulletin of ACS (of Oct 2009) on the uniqueness of the J Am Coll Surg. For that could not be said of its predecessor in its later years. In fact, I have to side with Richard Smith (Lancet 355:849, 200) and Richard Horton (Lancet 347:984, 1996) where they stated that the problem with surgical journals would appear to be the paucity of suitable surgical material that’s published and a deficient editorial oversight. For how else to explain some of the obvious redundancies? Take for instance the example I’m most familiar with. When I still received SGO (I stopped reading it when I reached 80), every few years an other article appeared in the journal on the anatomy of the liver (on casual examination I found Lanois et al SGO 174 (1992) 7, Czerniak et al: SGO 1777 (1993) 3003, Strasberg J Am Coll Surg 184 (1997) 413, Blumgart etal J Am Coll Surg 187 (1998) 417, Batagnani J Am Coll Surg 190 (2000) 631 and who knows how many I’ve missed) that dealt specifically with the anatomy of the lobar and segmental Glissonian structures, often taken verbatim from other sources but without referring to them. In fact, the quoted examples were far less detailed than the original publications that have been in the public domain for years. What is so special about the liver that its anatomy required a revisit year after year? As mentioned recently in the Lancet this and other features don’t reflect well on the quality of our surgical journals. Isn’t about time they stop repeating themselves?
I take issue with the remarks you made during the interview that you gave to the Bulletin. Despite the sweat equity you ascribe to the “success’ of the journal, there are several potential areas for improvement, areas that are presently often neglected. First, how often is a negative peer review, prior to the rejection of a paper, submitted to a rough evaluation for bias? (see William C Shoemaker:”On the editorial opinion and responsibility.” Surg 72(1972): 490 or my correspondence with the Lancet; 360 (2002): 805). Second, how often is an author asked for a statement of omission of important related, pertinent, preceding information in the literature?
Apropos these two points, it raises the priority issue, an important ethical problem that, unfortunately, is often neglected as the above quoted examples would indicate.