LeVay: When Science Goes Wrong

LeVay would like to think that these essays are studies in science as a human activity that can teach us lessons about how science operates. There's some of that but just as much it's the spectacle of a horrifying incident. These are not examples of the normal working of science as it advances by trial and error. These errors are more sensational, hardly work-a-day, and largely the result of hubris. On the other hand, science is what scientists do, so sometimes the results become the stuff of headlines. Largely these are stories more of personalities, less of science, but the mistakes and malfeasance of scientists can help clarify what is science and what is not science.

However, there are lessons to be learned and scienticity to be had. LeVay mostly avoids sensationalism by sticking to research, documenting facts, and doing some careful analysis to work out, in some cases, what couldn't have happened, what must actually have happened, and who seemed not to be telling the truth about it. Occasionally he veers in the direction of sensational journalism: in the chapter on the volcanologists caught in an eruption, several pages of descriptions of people trying to escape amidst blood and severed limbs littering the ground doesn't add much to our scientific understanding, but I suppose it does keep the narrative moving along. On the whole, though, LeVay keeps his prose less sensational, and he interpolates between his facts with fair precision rather than extrapolating into outlandish conjecture. The lessons in how science operates come more from trying to understand the incidents than from the incidents themselves.

For instance, this working out from the evidence of what must have happened in a little-known nuclear accident that killed three people:

LeVay's case studies are drawn from a number of disciplines: neuroscience (2 essays), meteorology, volcanology, engineering, gene therapy, nuclear physics, microbiology, forensics, space science, speech pathology, and nuclear chemistry. Most are likely not familiar to every reader, which gives LeVay the chance to cover the ground from a fresh perspective, and he does a pretty good job of it.