Remember when we talked about the problem with the “scientist-as-hero” narrative?
Here’s another example. Celebrity doctor / USC professor David Agus had a side gig putting his name on plagiarized books that he never read.
I get that some people are busy, but talk about lazy! Putting your name on a book you didn’t write is one thing, but not even reading it! C’mon, dude.
But—hey—you can see what happened, right? The title of this post is a line from a magazine article about the story. I don’t actually like the article because it seems like it was written by Agus’s publicist (it credits Agus as being “very involved” with the books that have his name on them, without explaining how a “very involved” author didn’t notice an entire section of plagiarized material about giraffes—how exactly did he “dictate the substance” of that bit??), but that one line about “never been told anything besides that he’s awesome” is a good one, and I think it captures a big problem with how science is reported.
Similar problems arise with non-scientist celebrity academics too. Alan Dershowitz and Steven Pinker got nearly uniformly-positive coverage until it came out that they were doing favors for Jeffrey Epstein. Cass Sunstein was swaggering around saying he’d discovered a new continent (i.e., he wrote a book about a topic he knew next to nothing about). Edgelord Marc Hauser was riding high until he wasn’t, etc etc etc.
These people get so much deference that they just take it as their due. I’d prefer more historically-informed paradigms of scientific progress.
P.S. How was it that Los Angeles Magazine decided to run an article presenting the plagiarizing professor as a good guy, an innocent victim of his ghostwriter? A clue comes from Google . . . an article by that same author in that same magazine from 2022, describing the not-yet-acknowledged plagiarist as “genius Forrest Gump, a soft-spoken and menschy cancer researcher,” and an article from 2014 where “Pioneering biomedical researcher David Agus reveals which clock stoppers excite him most,” and another from 2016 featuring “Longevity expert Dr. David Agus,” and, on the plus side, this article from 2021 encouraging people to take the covid vaccine.
Considering that this guy is “always uncomfortable being the focus of any media,” it’s funny that he has a page full of clips of TV and promotional appearances:
Including . . . a picture of a giraffe! Dude has giraffes on his mind. I’m starting to be suspicious of his implicit claim that he never read the chapter in his latest book that was plagiarized from “a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, ‘The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.'”
You mentioned Alan Dershowitz. He was charged with the same act you incredulously described as “putting your name on a book you didn’t write is one thing, but not even reading it!” by N. Finkelstein back in 2003.
Here is an excerpt from the debate:
N. Finkelstein: I read your book. Or the book you purport to have written.
A. Dershowitz: Now you claim somebody else wrote it?
N. Finkelstein: I hope so. For your sake I truly hope you did not write this book.
A. Dershowitz: I proudly wrote it.
N. Finkelstein: I think the honorable thing for you to do would be to say ‘I didn’t write the book, I had no time to read it. I’m sorry.’
Third party reviews of the issue are here and here. Also relevant is this recollection.
I don’t think N. Finkelstein was accusing A. Dershowitz: of not having written his book. He was poking fun at him because it is cover to cover nothing but lies Israel tells to itself, and the rest of us. Easily disprovable lies, the kind N. Finkelstein has spent his entire life exposing.
The part about being uncomfortable as the focus of any media was clearly written by his ghostwriter, who up to that point had successfully avoided any publicity whatsoever.