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which is to dance with her to Jack Johnson, “Better When We’re Together” around the living room. She cannot resist falling asleep to this. Except that halfway through the song I found myself inconsolably bawling and thinking that in another two or three or four decades I might be dancing with Lilah at her wedding to a song much like this. Hey, Lilah, by the way, if you are looking for a good father-daughter dance song at your wedding, my vote, as of your fifth week of life, is this song. I’ve got it on this thing that we use these days that we call a CD. I’ll explain all the old technology to you some day. I hope it still plays OK over the dried-up tears.

And then I wrote to Ortiz:

Jose—

As you can well testify, I have been quite supportive of your announcement of the discovery of 2003 EL61, and I have tried to make it as clear as possible in all public pronouncements that I regard your discovery as 100% legitimate.

Given this support, I am now extremely disappointed to learn that you have been less than honest about your actions. We have examined the web logs to the SMARTS records and have found that your computers examined those records shortly before your announcement of the discovery.

I regard this as a serious breach of scientific ethics and will make this information public shortly, but I would like to allow you the possibility of responding first. If you would like to in any way explain your actions please let me know within the next day.

Sincerely,

Mike

I went to sleep.

The next day, I checked for a response: nothing. And nothing the next day. And the next. I had said that I was going to make all of this information public in the next day or two, and the time was up. What should I do?

I waited. I couldn’t do the public blindsiding. I realized that I wasn’t looking to crush or humiliate Ortiz. I just wanted him to admit what had happened and to say he was sorry.

I waited. But my patience was not infinite. I wanted my apology. And I needed Ortiz to understand that his breach was serious. After weeks of silence from Ortiz, I wrote to the director of the institute where Ortiz worked:

Dear Dr. del Toro—

I regret to have to inform you about a formal complaint I recently made to the IAU about what is apparently unethical behavior by Jose-Luis Ortiz. As you are no doubt aware, Dr. Ortiz reported the discovery of the bright trans-Neptunian object 2003 EL61 late last month. At the time many in the community questioned whether Ortiz had found out about the object first from perusing our observing logs for the same object. I have repeatedly said that I believed that Ortiz’s discovery was legitimate and that I supported Ortiz et al. as receiving sole credit for the official discovery. I have publicly and privately dismissed the accusations and congratulated Ortiz and his team.

Sadly, I now find that Ortiz has not been honest about his access to our observing logs. We have now examined the records for the web server which show that Ortiz and Santos-Sanz indeed did access our observing logs. The first access came two days before the announcement of the discovery. Our observing logs were accessed multiple times over multiple days. Logs from several different nights were accessed, allowing a complete calculation of the orbits of all of the objects that we were tracking.

I feel it is likely that the explanation that will be proffered by Ortiz will be that the access to our observing records occurred after they had already made the discovery.… This is still a serious breach of scientific ethics. They accessed our observing logs, checked the object we were observing, noted it was the same as theirs, and quickly rushed to announcement with no acknowledgment of having known of our previous observations. I believe that such a behavior is a serious breach of scientific ethics and is deserving of censure.

It seems equally likely to suppose that Ortiz knew nothing of the object until accessing our logs. If this is the case, the behavior amounts to scientific fraud and is deserving of termination.

I have attempted to contact