Edition: U.S. / Global

Did the Penalty Fit the Crime?

By Morton Hunt: Morton Hunt writes about the behavioral and social sciences.
Published: May 14, 1989

FOR DR. SHERVERT FRAZIER, there was nothing special about that April day last year.

As usual, the tall, thickset, 66-year-old general director and psychiatrist in chief of McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass., outside Boston, had arisen at 5 A.M. An hour or so later, he was working out on his treadmill in his basement in Concord, where he lives. By 7:30, he was in his office and beginning his typically hectic, 10-hour working day.

Running a leading psychiatric institution was Frazier's life. McLean's, a private facility affiliated with Harvard Medical School, has only 328 beds, but Frazier, since becoming its top psychiatrist in 1972, had made it into a first-class teaching and research mental hospital.

The trustees, and Harvard, had chosen him for that post for good reason. Over the years, Frazier had held increasingly important posts in psychiatry, among them Commissioner of Mental Health and Mental Retardation of Texas and deputy director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was known as a walking encyclopedia of psychiatric knowledge, a spellbinding teacher, a supersalesman of high-quality psychiatric care and research, and a dynamic executive.

Frazier was also an expert fund-raiser. Federal grants to McLean's increased fivefold in a dozen years, and the Mailman Research Foundation of New York gave the hospital $1 million for a new research building largely because he was there. Given McLean's ample funds, Frazier was able to persuade a number of leading researchers of addiction disorders, psychopharmacology and other specialties to come to McLean's by providing them with research facilities.

From 1984 to 1986, he took a leave of absence from the hospital and from his professorship at Harvard Medical School to be director of the National Institute of Mental Health - the top job in American psychiatry. He then returned to McLean's as both general director and psychiatrist in chief. By early 1988, two new buildings had been added; he had signed up more top-notch staff, and had seen the research budget reach $11 million. Frazier had reason to feel good that April day.

At about the same time, in a library at the University of Rochester, Paul Scatena, a slight, 27-year-old graduate student in cognitive science who was studying the neurophysiology of pain, came across an article titled ''Psychiatric Aspects of Pain and the Phantom Limb'' in a minor medical journal. The authors were Shervert H. Frazier and Lawrence C. Kolb, another eminent psychiatrist.

The article had been published in 1970 and was a roundup of research by other psychiatrists. As he read a paragraph beginning, ''It is the obvious biological significance of pain that leads most of us to expect that it must always occur after an injury,'' Scatena was startled. He had read it before, and he felt sure he knew where.

He bounded down two flights to the stacks, and, in the February 1961 issue of Scientific American, found an article titled ''The Perception of Pain,'' by the psychologist Ronald Melzack. Its fourth paragraph began, ''It is the obvious biological significance of pain that leads most of us to expect that it must always occur after injury.''

Virtually the whole (Continued on Page 69) paragraph appeared, without attribution, in the Frazier and Kolb article.

Scatena was electrified. Once before he had spotted plagiarism, by a graduate student, notified department heads and saw the offender brought down. But Frazier was far bigger game. (Scatena identified Frazier, not Kolb, as the wrongdoer because the 1970 article, he found, was largely a repeat of a 1966 article by Frazier alone that included the same paragraph.) For many weeks, Scatena got little done toward his doctorate. He checked every sentence in the 1966 and 1970 articles, as well as in a 1975 Frazier article on pain, against every potential source he could find. ''Over three months, I spent the equivalent of a month of eight-hour days at it,'' he recalls. Why? ''Nothing personal - I don't know the man. But think of it - a major figure in psychiatry who was plagiarizing!''

By midsummer, Scatena had completed his efforts to look for unattributed sources of every paragraph of Frazier's three articles. He had identified the Melzack article as the source of not one but four paragraphs of the 1966 article; in a clear violation of scientific and literary ethics, these paragraphs had been lifted verbatim or had appeared in slightly edited form.

In addition, the source of three other paragraphs was acknowledged - an article by W. K. Livingston in Scientific American of March 1953 -but these paragraphs, appearing without quotation marks, and the original text were almost identical.

All this material appeared in essentially the same form in the 1970 and 1975 articles. With this ''damning evidence'' in hand, Scatena wrote to Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, hoping it would investigate the matter, but an editor suggested he take it up with Harvard. He thereupon set about compiling a detailed report, and some weeks later mailed a dossier to Daniel C. Tosteson, dean of the Harvard Medical School.