How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [76]
I hope that you feel, as I do, that these allegations of potential fraud at your Institute are extremely serious and should be thoroughly investigated.
Sincerely,
Mike Brown
The director must have quickly realized the seriousness of the charges. He promised to gather information, and he begged that we not hold the actions of Ortiz against his institution as a whole.
In a second e-mail, the director informed us that he had spoken with Ortiz and encouraged him to respond.
Having now had most of the month to think about all of the implications of what had happened, I wrote a much more detailed e-mail to Ortiz and Santos-Sanz, with a full accounting of everything we knew. It was hard for me to imagine that there was any way out for them but to confess and apologize.
I waited.
After nearly a month, I opened my e-mail one day to find a message from Ortiz. What would his response be? Would he angrily deny his actions? Would he gush gratefully for having been given the chance to redeem himself after such a mistake? Would he try to negotiate some solution favorable to himself? I was eager—and nervous—to see what his response was going to be; it was likely to thoroughly define whatever course the future was going to take.
Ortiz came out swinging: I was to blame for all of this, and indeed, I was universally regarded as a menace to science itself, so I should be the last one to discuss ethics. Instead, I should apologize to the international scientific community and quit my secretive ways. If I reformed, Ortiz was even willing to give me credit for the discovery of 2003 EL61. He would be happy simply to be noted as the person who first reported the discovery. I should think it over, and we should talk again at the end of the month.
It seemed to me that in Ortiz’s view he had not stolen K40506A; he had liberated it. I had been hiding it all along, in clear violation of what he considered accepted rules of science. Thus Ortiz should be commended rather than condemned for taking the information and setting it free.
In some ways that he didn’t quite know, Ortiz was right. I had been hiding information. I had detailed records of exactly what Ortiz had done, and I had delayed telling anyone for a month, in the hope that an amicable solution could be found. That hope was now clearly dashed. I posted the records of Ortiz’s access to our database on the Web. The next day, a long story about allegations and counterallegations appeared on the front page of the science section of The New York Times. Stories about the allegations showed up in all of the major scientific newsmagazines. And on the day that the story broke, José-Luis Ortiz was named Worst Person in the World by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, beating out a Sri Lankan Airlines flight attendant who had called in a bomb threat so she could have the day off.
In some ways, though, Ortiz’s argument almost sounded reasonable. We had been keeping our discoveries secret. That must be bad, right?
Until then I had simply ignored the protestations of the Internet chat group that accused us of malicious behavior, assuming that responding would simply give credence to the allegations; but as always, the Swift-boating had worked. I even started getting e-mails from real scientists asking me why we were hiding things.
I finally had to respond. I stayed up late that night and wrote a long post on my website, which ended up being reproduced around the world. I acknowledged the accusations that we hide discoveries and harm science, and then I wrote:
One of the things that is so strange about these allegations is that they should also be made of every single scientific result that is published in every single reputable scientific journal. In all such cases, scientists