When Science Goes Wrong (35 page)

Like the Mars Climate Orbiter, the Polar Lander was plagued with problems during its journey to Mars, but navigational errors were not among them; the navigational software did not contain the units error that destroyed the Orbiter. By the time the Lander reached Mars, it looked like all the kinks had been ironed out, but after it began its descent through the atmosphere nothing more was heard from it. Once again, Richard Cook was delegated to give the waiting press an upbeat assessment of the situation. ‘I’m very confident the Lander survived the descent,’ he said, five hours after it should have been broadcasting its first images. The reason for the Lander’s demise was never established with certainty, but the most probable cause was a set of faulty sensors in the spacecraft’s landing legs. These, investigators believe, told the Lander’s computer that the spacecraft had landed while in fact it was still airborne. This caused the Lander to switch off its retrorocket prematurely and fall to the surface at a speed sufficient to destroy the entire spacecraft. Again, then, the root cause of the loss was attributed to a failure at Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of both spacecraft.

The loss of the Lander, coming so quickly after that of the Orbiter, triggered an investigation that was independent of NASA. This one was headed by Tom Young, former executive vice president of Lockheed Martin – an odd choice, perhaps, given that anyone associated with the company might be expected to lay blame somewhere outside the company’s purview. In fact, Young’s report laid most emphasis for the failures on niggardly federal funding for the missions: they were underfunded by at least 30 per cent, Young wrote.

Casani and Thurman concurred. ‘That was the problem,’ said Casani. ‘The only way that you could get the costs down was with less people.’ ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper was raging like influenza through the agency,’ said Thurman. ‘NASA and JPL should not have attempted to do two missions with that ambition and with that kind of cost and schedule. To me, that’s the fundamental root cause.’

As the boss of NASA and a political appointee, Dan Goldin took a different line, accusing Lockheed Martin of having underbid to win the contract for the missions. ‘I think in this circumstance that the Lockheed Martin team was overly aggressive, because their focus was on the winning,’ he said in a PBS interview. ‘The Lockheed Martin Company did not pay attention, and I know it sounds like a paradox, but it was more important to them to win for today, and they didn’t think of the long-term future or the reputation of their company.’

In any event, Lockheed Martin Astronautics went through a tough period after the Mars ’98 failures. The company suffered financial losses, NASA cancelled a contract for a follow-up mission and many astronautical engineers left the company, at least temporarily. But it rebounded, and in 2001 Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract for a successor to Mars Global Surveyor – a spacecraft named Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This was launched in 2005 and successfully went into orbit around Mars the following year. Orbital insertion was aided by a new technology, in which photographs of Mars’s two moons were used to get a precise fix on the spacecraft’s position as it approached the planet. As if to celebrate this success, in September of 2006 Lockheed Martin was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract, this time to build Orion, the successor to the Space Shuttle.

As to the mantras of ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ and ‘Mission Success First’, Steve Jolly expressed some scepticism. ‘I think what we do is avoid using any branding like that,’ he said. ‘Not because it’s not fashionable anymore, but because slogans can sometimes hurt you. Now the real approach is, what’s the right design to accomplish the objectives that we’re being asked to do, and what’s the doable cost associated with that? What we’re finding is that we can still leverage all those technologies and approaches that were developed in the nineties to pull off what we call ‘best-value missions’ for the government.’

Although Lockheed Martin lost some employees after the Mars ’98 failure, the hapless young engineer who made the units error was not fired; in fact, he’s still with the company. ‘He has a lead position; he’s in the critical path for all the flying missions that we have,’ said Jolly. ‘You know, that’s the noble way to do it. Engineers do not walk in and say, “I’m going to make a mistake today.”’

The Mars Climate Orbiter is the only US space mission to have failed on account of a confusion of units, but several others have failed or gone seriously wrong on account of similarly ‘dumb errors’ in data handling. In April 1999, for example, a
Titan
IVB rocket carrying a military satellite failed to reach orbit after its upper stage lost stability and broke up. The mishap was caused by the misplacement of a single decimal point in the control-system software.

Confusion of units has been the cause of many mishaps in other fields of science. Medicine and medical research has been particularly susceptible, most commonly with respect to drug dosages. A tragic example occurred in Ottawa, Canada, in 2002. Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario were testing the use of the interleukin-2, an immune system booster, in the treatment of a childhood cancer known as neuroblastoma. The first patient, one-year-old Ryan Carroll, became severely ill during the drug treatment, but he survived. Rather than halting the trial, the researchers proceeded to treat another patient, four-year-old Ryan Lucio, with the same drug regimen. After four injections, he suffered multiple organ failure and died. At this point, his doctors went back and examined his treatment plan, and they discovered a terrible mistake. Instead of calculating the dose of interleukin-2 in units of micrograms per square metre of body area as they should have done, they had calculated it in micrograms per kilogram of body weight, which meant that they had given him an approximately 25-fold overdose. They soon realised that Ryan Carroll had been overdosed in the same way.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which had approved the trial, went ballistic and posted an excoriating critique of the trial’s principal investigator, Dr Jacqueline Halton, on its website. Health Canada, on the other hand, expressed little, if any, criticism and quickly issued its approval for the trial to continue. It may be that Health Canada’s mild-mannered approach reflected guilt that it had allowed the two Ryans to be experimented on at a time when the proper application and safety assurances had not been provided by the researchers, contrary to Canadian law.

SPEECH PATHOLOGY: The Monster Study

ON THE MORNING OF January 17, 1939, a 23-year-old graduate student named Mary Tudor set out with five colleagues from the campus of the University of Iowa at Iowa City. Their destination was the Iowa Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home in the town of Davenport, 50 miles to the east on the Mississippi River. Tudor’s mission was to discover the cause of stuttering. She didn’t accomplish her mission, but the methods she used in her attempt to do so eventually became the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and fierce ethical controversy.

The experiment that Tudor planned to perform on the orphanage children was directed by her advisor, Wendell Johnson, a 32-year-old assistant professor in the Departments of Psychology, Speech, and Child Welfare at the University of Iowa. Johnson, who died in 1965, devoted his life to the study of stuttering. He was largely responsible for transforming stuttering from a risible handicap to a topic of serious academic and clinical research, and many of the leading experts in the field today are his students or ‘grandstudents’. Thus, although the particular theories he espoused may not have stood the test of time, he is revered as a founder of the field and a long-time advocate for people with speech disorders.

Johnson himself stuttered. In a 1930 book, he described how he began to stutter at the age of five, after several years of normal childhood speech. Nothing in particular seems to have provoked the onset of the disability – no physical illness, personal loss, or traumatic experience. Nor were there other stutterers in Johnson’s family. In fact, Johnson’s childhood was quite typical for a boy born into a rural Kansas household in the early 1900s.

During his first few years of stuttering, the trait caused him relatively little hardship. He was held back a year in school on account of his disability, but he was not punished for it or subjected to any unusually harsh remedies. For the most part, his family and his few playmates tolerated his stuttering amicably; they would sometimes help him out by completing the words that he stumbled on. In fact, his stuttering helped motivate him to shine in ways that compensated for the disability – in academics, sports and in jovial social interactions. Thus, paradoxically, the experience of being a person who stuttered may have been a positive factor in Johnson’s career and in his personal life.

At the age of 16, Johnson was subjected to the first serious effort to eliminate his stutter: he was sent for the summer to a residential school that offered a programme for this purpose. Johnson and his fellow students were taught to speak in a slow, drawling monotone. They were taught to speak rhythmically, while swinging Indian clubs or doing other exercises to set the rhythm. They were taught to ignore other people’s negative reactions to their stuttering. And they tried to follow the director’s exhortation to ‘Use your will power. Don’t give up. Be the master of your fate and the captain of your soul!’

And to a point, it worked. Johnson became less afraid of stuttering, and perhaps as a consequence he stuttered less or not at all – within the protective environs of the school. As soon as he re-entered the wider world, however, his stutter returned with full ferocity.

After completing high school with honours – he was class valedictorian – Johnson attended nearby McPherson College. While there, he learned that a programme of research on stuttering was being started at the University of Iowa’s Speech Clinic, and he transferred to that university in 1926. Johnson recounts how, as one of his first tasks there, he had to read aloud for five minutes before a class of students: during that time he was able to get four words out of his mouth. In spite of that inauspicious start, Johnson remained at the University of Iowa for his entire life. He obtained a BA in 1928 and a PhD in psychology in 1931, and was appointed assistant professor in 1937 and full professor in 1945.

During his early years at the university, Johnson’s advisors suspected that stuttering resulted from a developmental miswiring of the brain – specifically, an error in the assignment of functions to the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. They came up with the idea that Johnson, who to all appearances was right-handed, would be better off left-handed. For several years, therefore, Johnson was equipped with a variety of devices that prevented him from using his right hand and forced him to use his left. Other stuttering students were similarly outfitted, and they became a familiar sight on campus, their good arms bandaged or tied back as they struggled to perform life’s tasks with their clumsier arms.

This and a variety of other experiments failed to cure Johnson or his fellow students of their stutters. And, gradually, Johnson began to reject the general theory that stuttering was caused by some inborn miswiring of the brain, and to consider a very different set of ideas based on the premise that social interactions were the key to the disorder.

Most central to Johnson’s new thinking was the notion that the very act of labelling a child a stutterer might turn him or her into one. In part, this idea was influenced by Johnson’s reading of the work of the Polish-American psychologist Alfred Korzybski, founder of a field he called General Semantics. Korzybski was interested in the impact of labels on people’s perceptions of things. According to one anecdote, for example, he shared some biscuits with his students, and after they had eaten them showed them the package, which read DOG COOKIES. This caused some of the students, who had previously enjoyed the biscuits, to rush to the toilet to vomit. Interestingly, this demonstration brought up – in miniature – some of the same ethical concerns that later plagued the Tudor study.

But why would anyone label a child a stutterer if he or she did not already stutter? According to Johnson, it was because
all
young children mangle their speech to a certain extent. These normal childhood ‘disfluencies’ are typically ignored by parents, teachers and peers, and they disappear over time as the child’s speaking skills improve. Some parents, however, develop an inordinate concern with their children’s disfluencies, Johnson believed. They become obsessed with the notion that the child is beginning to stutter, and they communicate that obsession to the child, calling him or her a stutterer and drawing unnecessary and repeated attention to every inconsequential error of speech that the child may commit. In doing so, the parents do not merely impose on the child the identity of a stutterer, but they also inculcate in the child an intense fear of stuttering. Thus the child, in speaking, anticipates making errors, becomes increasingly tense and fights his or her own vocal organs. This inner battle leads to the syllable repetitions, prolongations and other phenomena that are the behavioural hallmarks of stuttering. Johnson’s ideas became known as the ‘diagnosogenic’ theory of stuttering, so called because the trait originates in the very act of diagnosis.