 Age, The -
-
CONSERVATIVE historian Keith Windschuttle - who has previously derided left-wing academics for sloppy fact-checking and fabrication - has been caught in a hoax involving fake CSIRO research, genetic modification and a non-existent biotechnologist.
Windschuttle, editor of the literary magazine Quadrant, published an essay in the current edition purporting to be by a biotechnologist, Dr Sharon Gould, who claimed the CSIRO had planned to commercialise wheat, mosquitoes and cows that had been modified with human genes.
"Commercialisation of both these projects was abandoned, along with the wheat project ... because of perceived ethical issues in the public and media understanding," the article stated.
But online news website Crikey yesterday revealed the article as a hoax, relying on "false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes". "Gould", journalist Margaret Simons wrote, was a pseudonym constructed by an anonymous blogger, while the CSIRO has also confirmed the claims made in the article were false.
Simons said she had known about the hoax for three weeks, after the article had been accepted for publication.
She would not reveal the identity of the hoaxer but firmly denied she was responsible.
Windschuttle, whose book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History took aim at historians for exaggerating, and even fabricating, the conflict between Aborigines and white settlers, remains deeply suspicious of Simons' involvement and the ethics of Crikey for allowing the hoax to continue.
"I think Quadrant's reputation will emerge from this completely unscathed. I think the reputation that's likely to be questioned is that of Crikey and Margaret Simons," he said.
Robert Manne, former Quadrant editor and long-time opponent of Windschuttle's on the " history wars ", said there were "tears rolling down my cheeks" while he was reading the article. "I would have thought that it was so obvious it wouldn't have worked but it turns out that it did," he said. "So you'd have to say that it's well executed."
Crikey editor Jonathan Green stood by the story, "emphatically" denied that he, or anyone else at Crikey, was responsible for the ruse, and was unapologetic for not exposing the hoax earlier. "I don't think I have any ethical, journalistic or moral responsibility to save Keith from himself," he said.
The article, titled "Scare Campaigns and Science Reporting", also refers - in its opening sentence - to the Sokal hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a post-modern studies journal to test whether they would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
Connections have also been made between the Gould hoax and the famous literary ruse of "Ern Malley", the fictitious poet devised by Adelaide writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart to undermine the standards of the 1940s modernist magazine, Angry Penguins.
The irony of that historical link is that McAuley later went on to co-found Quadrant.
Windschuttle, however, denies he was taken in by a hoax, calling it a fraud instead.
"It's a piece of fraudulent journalism submitted under false pretences," he said. "It's not a real hoax. A real hoax is something that exposes people's ignorance of a topic and laughs at them for their pretension."
Windschuttle said that many of the points and references in the article were correct, including the names of institutes, books, journals and scientific discoveries. But he admitted that he would double-check the substance of an article and its author in the future.
Geneticist Rick Roush, dean of the University of Melbourne's school of land and environment, said the article seemed plausible but some of the claims made little sense.
"It's hard to put your finger on any one thing that's wrong, but the sense of it is wrong," he said.
"In principle, it might be possible to make milk that's non-allergenic for lactose-intolerant infants, but why would you use human gene sequences to do it?"
|