This past January, Hwang Woo-Suk, a former researcher at Seoul National University in South Korea, publicly admitted that his claim to have cloned human embryos was not true. My friends and I were amazed and amused that anyone could think they would get away with something so blatant—publishing nonreplicable data results on which future researchers would base their experiments. What could Hwang have been thinking?

That question could well have been the seed of Allegra Goodman's latest novel. In Intuition, the setting has changed to the Philpott Institute, a fictitious cancer research lab situated here in Cambridge, a few blocks beyond the Science Center. But the situation remains much the same. Postdoctoral student Cliff, a California boy whose spirits are flagging after several years of unproductive research, suddenly finds positive results for his R-7 virus variant, which appears to eradicate tumors in lab mice. When he announces his findings, the lab heads are swept up in a storm of publicity, while the post-docs all work overtime to replicate his astonishing results.

What no one knows is whether Cliff disposed of mice whose responses to R-7 were not ideal. Goodman wisely leaves the moment in shadow until the end of the novel. We end up in the same state of mind as the lab personnel, suspecting Cliff, but wanting his results to be real.

Part of Cliff's initial appeal is that he has the somewhat unscientific urge to rely on his instincts rather than the data. The clearest explanation we ever get of his behavior is this: "Perhaps his work with R-7 had been more about ideas than concrete facts; perhaps his findings had been intuitive rather than entirely empirical...He had sifted out what was significant, and the rest had floated off like chaff."

Intuition, true to its title, is more concerned with rationalization and denial than with conscious wrongdoing. Goodman is at her best when characters struggle not to be aware of their gut instincts. In the insular world of empirical research, she unearths the slowly accumulating effects of delusion, ambition, and idealism.

As the story progresses, everyone in the lab is implicated in different ways, drawn little by little into what becomes a major scandal, complete with a Congressional trial. Lab head Sandy Glass, in his optimism and eagerness to get publicity, builds up expectations of the far-reaching possibilities of R-7 before Cliff's results have been replicated even once. His partner, Marion Mendelssohn, known for her exacting adherence to rules and regulations in research, overlooks Cliff's sloppy record-keeping habits. Feng, the most reserved of the post-docs, suspects Cliff but merely chooses to distance himself from the R-7 research rather than risking his own career by voicing doubts.

It is Robin, an older post-doc who happens to be Cliff's ex-girlfriend, who eventually questions the research. Not surprisingly, morality and likeability do not go hand in hand here. Whereas Cliff is a likeable and easygoing Stanford grad, Robin is less glamorous—no Ivy League pedigree, no brilliant research, few friends, and years of unsuccessful but rigorous work in the Mendelssohn-Glass lab.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Intuition is the reluctance of almost everyone to admit the possibility of falsified data. Cliff and the lab heads are quick to blame Robin's failure to replicate results on sloppiness, and attribute her accusations to jealousy. Goodman's skill at finessing her characters into morally compromising situations makes it difficult for the reader to know whom to point fingers at. It is just as hard to blame the lab heads for publicizing Cliff's findings as for their later professing ignorance in order to avoid culpability. It is harder still to blame them for mistrusting Robin's motivations.

Goodman takes a situation—falsified research—where we would not expect to question our intuition of right and wrong, and teases out its complexities until we hardly know whom to punish and whom to praise.

Indeed, the author may be unsure of this herself: Goodman's noticeable shortcoming in Intuition is that, having so unraveled the minutiae of her characters' psyches, she doesn't deliver a story with a clean finish. The last few chapters are laborious and inconclusive. One hardly knows whether to blame Goodman or her subject matter.

 

Emer Vaughn is a senior in Leverett House.