Science Magazine 10/29/99  Vol. 286  pp. 884-5.
 
CLEARED OF MISCONDUCT, GEOSCIENTIST SUES CRITICS
 
Ronald Dorn, a prominent geoscientist at Arizona State University
(ASU) in Tempe, has filed suit against the authors of an article,
published last year in Science, who raised doubts about some of his
work. Dorn is charging that statements made in the article, along with
other comments by some of the authors, implied that he had doctored
rock samples used to date ancient stone carvings.

Earlier this month, two investigations concluded that Dorn did not
commit scientific misconduct, and last week Dorn finished officially
informing the eight scientists that he is suing them for
defamation. Both sides are staying mum about the suit, but some
observers worry that the litigation could deter potential
whistleblowers and chill public discussion of scientific
controversies.  The suit is based on a 4-year-old controversy that
revolves around a dating technique that Dorn developed in the
mid-1980s but abandoned as flawed in 1996. To date stone carvings and
geological features such as old shorelines, Dorn used acid to extract
microscopic quantities of organic material, including plant remains,
from beneath a thin layer of natural varnish on rock surfaces. He then
sent the material to an accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) laboratory
to measure the amount of radioactive carbon-14, which decays at a
known rate, that was present in the samples. The technique became
controversial after it yielded ages for some stone artifacts from the
southwestern United States that were several thousand years older than
those accepted by many archaeologists.

In 1996, geoscientist Warren Beek of the AMS laboratory at the
University of Arizona, Tucson, discovered that a sample of Dorn that
he was processing contained coal and charcoal grains of vastly
different ages. Those variations, he and co-authors later wrote
Science, made the dates obtained by the technique "ambiguous"
(Science, 26 June 1998 p. 2132). They also noted that they were unable
to find the grains in samples that we not prepared in Dorn's
lab. Beck, geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and other
researchers co-authored a paper that was eventually submitted to
Science, which published it last June as a Technical Comment
accompanied by a response from Dorn.

Although the authors did not accuse Dorn of misconduct, several shared
their findings with officials at ASU and the National Science
Foundation SF), which had funded some of Dorn's work. Both
organizations began investigations of whether Dorn had manipulated the
ages of his samples by adding the carbon grains.
 
This month ASU and NSF cleared Dorn. A faculty panel established by
ASU concluded that "the evidence did not support allegations that Dorn
added coal or charcoal to rock varnish samples" and that studies
showed the materials occurred together naturally.  In June, even
before the finding was released, however, Dorn moved to file suit
against the authors of the Science paper, charging that their
statements were "published with an 'evil heart.' " His amended
complaint, filed on 5 October in Maricopa County Superior Court, cites
remarks attributed to Beck and Broecker by the Arizona Daily Star, and
letters from Broecker to ASU NSF, that deal with the feasibility of
doctoring samples. In the complaint, Dorn says Such remarks "clearly
implied professional misconduct" and "seriously damaged" his ability
to win grants, although the suit claims no specific amount for
damages. In addition to Beck and Broecker, Dorn is suing Douglas
Donahue, A.J.T. Jull, and George Burr of the University of Arizona's
AMS Laboratory, Broecker's employer, Columbia University; linguist and
rock art researcher Ekkehart Malotki of Northern Arizona University in
Flagstaff, and Georges Bonani and Irka Hajdas of the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich.
 
Lawyers say Dorn's case may rest on whether he can show that the
authors went beyond normal academic discourse in criticizing
him. Gilbert Whittemore, whose firm, Stalter & Kennedy in Boston, is
not involved in the case, says the possibility of such litigation
could prompt researchers to avoid future controversies. "Scientific
disputes normally get worked out by a riproaring debate in the
literature," he says, not in the courtroom. -David Malakoff