An unsettling theme of the past year has been the string of high-visibility, dramatic, career-destroying moves by professionals who in some way hold the public's trust. I suppose these include all the high-profile accounting scandals, insider trading scandals, and bogus stock research fiascos. But what I find more unsettling than financial scandals (which are not really that suprising) are young professionals, pursuing somewhat idealized fields, who have torpedoed their careers at the outset in quite heinous ways. The first of these that I noticed was Thad Roberts, who was a friend of mine for several years before he became a NASA intern. While in Houston, he involved himself in a half-cocked scheme to steal a safe full of moon rocks from the Apollo missions. Here was a guy who I really respected. He was bright, energetic, charismatic, and motivated, with the dream of becoming an astronaut. He is one of the few fellow students in my experience who could actually help me understand something in class (usually if I don't get, no one else does either). He had a good life, and he had clear dreams and goals, and I admired him. Some of my own choices have been partly motivated by a desire to emulate him. And then he does that... I've spent a lot of time churning over this. Meanwhile, Hendrik Schon was busy falsifying experimental data for his PhD thesis at Delf University. He then went on to falsify experiments at Bell Labs. In September, an investigative committee found him guilty of scientific misconduct. Schon had published a rediculous number of papers, many of them in the journals Science and Nature. Once his fraud was discovered, it resulted in the largest block retraction in the history of Science [link]. Eight papers were retracted by Schon's various co-authors. Papers in Nature also were retracted. Not that anyone reads these minor journals... Schon's actions disturb me because he is professionally not too distant from me. I understand the drive to make things work. I've often sat watching a statistical measurement and thought that perhaps I would get a better result if I threw out the current measurement and started it over. That isn't fraudulent, but it is not good science. I understand the desire to see something work, and the pressure of deadlings and the need for publications. It would be very easy to rationalize one or two small overstatements, or a massaging of the results for aesthetic appeal. But how long is it before you've stolen your moon samples, sold them on the black market, replaced them in the lab with chunks of asphalt, and then written scores of widely read papers about how the moon is covered in asphalt? Once you've fabricated all that impressive research, maybe Jayson Blair can help you get famous with a favorably embellished article in the New York Times. Of course it is unsettling when someone is caught repeatedly falsifying events in the New York Times. I'm not too worried about Blair, though, because the stuff he falsified was evidently nothing that I ever read or would care about very much. The most disconcerting thing to me about the Times' long article is its occassional references to Blair's grooming and dietary habits: "Jerry Gray, one of several Times editors to become mentors to Mr. Blair, repeatedly warned him that he was too sloppy — in his reporting and in his appearance." I wish I knew what they meant by that. Was he not abiding by the dress code? Failing to shave regularly? Another statement in the article uses the term "eccentricity" in reference to Blair's appearance. Another quote from the article: Blair's editor said, "I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machines." Another editor later said of Blair, "He works the way he lives — sloppily." Some of these comments are just a bit too cryptic. I suppose what really impacts me in all of these stories is the realization that I can still screw up very dramatically. After so many years of work it seems impossible to think that I might discard my career before I really even get started. But these guys managed to do it. I always wonder what happens to these people next. Where will they be in ten years? Can Thad or Hendrik ever go back to science? Can they recover from such high crimes, like Iran-Contra conspirators? Or will they suffer a fate of oblivion, like the DC mayoral aide who said "niggardly?" I asked some physics professors at Utah what they thought about this. They suggested Thad might change his name and start over as a student, but no one would work with him if they knew who he was or what he'd done. There but for the grace of Chance go I.