"In the Name of Science" by Andrew Goliszek

Goliszek's theatrics notwithstanding, "In the Name of Science" does provide a useful map to the low points in the history of science, a map whose landmarks ought to be better remembered by scientists and by a culture that dotes on science.

On Nov. 18, 1953, for instance, CIA doctors who believed that LSD would be a handy drug for humiliating world leaders decided to test the substance on unsuspecting guests at a social gathering of government scientists taking place in Deep Creek Lane, Md. The doctors poured 70 micrograms of LSD into a bottle of brandy set out at the party. "Twenty minutes later," Goliszek writes, the group became "increasingly boisterous," and one guest, Frank Olson, a U.S. Army civilian employee, "felt especially edgy." Olson, in other words, had a bad trip, and over the next few days, his condition worsened. He shuttled between doctors in New York and Washington, depressed and deathly afraid, he told government doctors, to face his family. At 2:30 a.m. one morning, weeks after the party, Olson leaped out of a 10th-floor window at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, "his secret dying with him until it was eventually uncovered decades later," Goliszek writes.

"In the Name of Science" brims with such accounts of death by secret illness, and lives lived in the grip of mysterious ailments caused by secret experimentation. Soldiers are particularly vulnerable to the horrors of science; they are assaulted not only by enemy forces, but also by their own governments. Goliszek tells of the Army's postwar radiological experiments on its soldiers, including a chilling account of men who were instructed to march into the plume of a nuclear detonation in the Utah desert.

"Like a wave of green ants, the soldiers emerged slowly onto the hot desert and moved in unison toward the cloud," he writes. "Those blinded or dazed by the fireball were left behind. Others were selected for psychological examination to determine the effects of stress and the emotional impact of a nuclear detonation. The remaining troops conducted field exercises, maneuvering across the desert and through what looked like a brown and gray dust storm. Above them, a B-17 flew directly into the cloud, tracking its movement and analyzing how much was diffusing and how much was actually falling to the ground."

What did the military expect to learn from these experiments, and what did it learn? Goliszek doesn't say, which highlights another frustration the reader encounters in his book. It would be revealing to see how the scientists who conducted experiments on humans justified the research to themselves. Were they indeed, as Goliszek's title implies, interested only in furthering scientific knowledge, and willing to do whatever was required to sate their curiosity? And did it turn out that, despite the grief their research produced, science was well-served by their experiments? Did they feel that what they did was, in other words, somehow worth it?

The answers to these remain, like much in this book, a mystery. One would like to believe, however, that the scientists documented here harbored no illusions that they were acting in the best tradition of their profession, and that most scientists know the difference between working in the name of science and working, as many here did, in the interest of some lesser goal -- the perceived national interest, say, or the bottom line.

Goliszek would like us to believe otherwise. In the future, scientists will have unprecedented powers to steer us wrong, and we would do well to be skeptical about their claims, he says. We need to realize, he writes, "that we're merely at the water's edge when it comes to scientific advances; and while there's an entire ocean of new discoveries waiting to be uncovered, we're only now beginning to feel the salt spray in the air." While Goliszek doesn't quite make the case that we should indict the entire profession, the note of caution he strikes is worth hearing.

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