A very ‘Rhum’ affair

Sabbagh’s story has a number of intriguing themes. First there is the reconstruction of the botanical detective work by John Raven that led to the discovery of the fraud. Then there are the suggestions of collusion within the British academic-scientific establishment to ensure the issue was not publicised and would quietly die away. Underlying all this is the interplay between passionate men and women of science, Heslop Harrison’s supporters and his critics, and the behind-the-scenes influence of the great university colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. Not the least of many interesting aspects of the book is the island of Rum itself*.

Heslop Harrison was a larger-than-life character, described by colleagues as forceful and opinionated. He attracted friends and enemies. He was utterly intolerant of criticism, and fell out badly with colleagues whom he thought should have been backing him and not siding with the opposition.

And he was not just a prominent botanist and field naturalist.

He was also an outspoken supporter and promoter of Lamarkism (the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited, as opposed to the Darwinian notion of evolution being a matter of chance mutation and survival of the fittest). He even carried out and published a research project which demonstrated, to the great satisfaction of the Lamarkists, that white moths in England’s industrial north which became covered with soot and ingested aerial pollution, produced dark-winged offspring as a result. This research has since been roundly rejected, basically on the grounds of poor methodology and lack of statistical control, but it needs to be remembered that Lamarkism was popular among many scientists of the day (and still has its modern promoters), this being before the genetic mechanisms underpinning Darwin’s theory of evolution were known.

However, given what we now know about his botanical research, it is hard to escape the thought that Heslop Harrison manipulated his moth research to get the results he wanted.

The most difficult aspect of the story is to find any satisfactory motivation for Heslop Harrison to attempt such a blatant fraud. Apart from anything else, botany is a discipline in which such an attempt would be almost impossible to sustain, given the long traditions of specimen collection, archiving, repeat survey and ecological and taxonomic research. As Sabbagh points out, and statements from many of Heslop Harrison’s contemporaries confirm, Heslop Harrison was powerfully wedded to theories and concepts such as Lamarkism and the survival of pre-Ice Age flora on the Hebrides. Perhaps he painted himself into a corner over this last issue, and the more scientifically isolated he became on it, the greater was the need to ensure something concrete was discovered for confirmation. Perhaps also, there is no need to look further than to the flaws and human frailties to which all of us are heir.

Looking back, the suggestion that the scientific and academic establishment were happy to sweep Heslop Harrison under the carpet, as it were, and let the accusations of fraud fade quietly away, is also disturbing. There is an old saying “the truth will always out”. Every scientist and academic must know amd respect this.

Towards the end of his book, Sabbagh digresses and discusses other notable examples of scientific fraud during the 19th and 20th centuries. All filled me with unease. Eventually my thoughts turned back to the puzzle of the divergent temperature records for Darwin, and to questions of scientific integrity and to the trust we put in our scientists and the scientific process. It will be intriguing indeed to see where this particular case ends. Not, one hopes, in a follow-up book by Karl Sabbagh.

* The history of Rum is fascinating. It is one of the largest islands of the Inner Hebrides, that windswept archipelago scattered along the west coast of Scotland. Today it is a nature reserve and basically uninhabited, but in the 18th century it had a population of several hundred crofters and fishermen, each with their small leasehold lands or cottages, all owned by the Laird. In the early 1800s, the island was purchased by a Lancashire industrialist who foreclosed on the crofters and fishermen and ejected them from the island. His son inherited the island, built a huge castle on it, and then largely kept the place to himself and his family. Heslop Harrison was one of the few people made welcome, and he came to treat Rum as his own private natural history museum.