A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh Search Amazon for other books by or about Karl Sabbagh. Rating: Reviewed by: David Smillie

Good heavens ... it's a Monty Python sketch come to life. A respected British scientist who makes a number of astonishing discoveries ... rare plants on an isolated Scottish island, where the plants have no right to be. Year after year, he goes back to the island, making more and more interesting discoveries. Until a young researcher also visits the island ... and accuses him of "planting" the plants himself ­ in order to discover them. After an angry confrontation, the young researcher writes up a scathing report.

Which sits, virtually unread and ignored for fifty years. Throw in a couple of dead parrots and I can easily picture John Cleese, striding across the highlands and surreptitiously stooping down to slip a couple of foreign plants into the soil. Astonishingly, the story is true. It's a little known tale of deceit and detection in the genteel world of botany.

Yes, botany. Which is, as Karl Sabbagh points out, part of the problem:

"Botany does not have the image of a serious science. Physicists, chemists, biologists, even mathematicians represent in the public mind the potential to do great good ­ or great evil. But you don't expect botanists to win Nobel Prizes and, just as important, you don't expect them to one day destroy the world."

Which is probably part of the reason why I'd never heard of this case of incredibly­ wide-spread scientific fraud before. It's "only" botany. But it's a remarkable tale, featuring two opposing characters who seem to be more from a novel than from the real world. On the one hand is the domineering and dominant professor, who's moved up from his working­-class origins to become a dominant (and domineering) figure in British botany. His opponent is a shy, diffident young man of patrician stock.

While the story of how the young John Raven unveiled the systematic fraud of his opponent is fascinating in itself, the book is even better. Because the book is as much about Sabbagh's quest to uncover the story, fifty years after the fact, as it's about the story itself. Sabbagh has to follow a complicated web of rumour and innuendo, trying to sort out fact from fiction.

In the end, Sabbagh (like Raven) is unable to come up with a smoking gun, but does manage to build up a convincing case of circumstantial evidence. But there's another element to this book, because it looks at the whole issue of scientific fraud. What incentive does an established scientist have to falsify results? What can he (or she) possibly gain, when there's so much to lose? Sabbagh delves into this question, not only in this particular Rum Affair (the name, by the way comes from the Scottish island of Rum--also spelled Rhum) but by introducing several other cases of scientific malfeasance, to see how they might shed light on the incident.

It's a remarkably good read, combining extensive scholarship with dry British wit (describing one man as "the doyen of British botanical historians (in fact he may be the only British botanical historian)", or referring to disputes between botanists as "a matter of naturalists red in tooth and claw") and presenting a story that's astonishing to read. Not only because a noted, respected scientist was able to systematically lie and falsify results for so long ... but that he was never punished or even publicly censured. Instead, it was decided (in such a British way) not to do anything. Instead, other scientists just gradually erased his findings from the experimental record and acted as if the whole sordid affair never happened.

Until, fifty years later, a BBC producer happened to come across the missing report. (I see Michael Palin in that role ...)