Scientist at center of Mars flap speaks out

Despite the NASA denial, Stoker says, the original impressions leave strong traces in people’s minds.

“A story like that goes out and the first thing that happens is that everyone who reads it believes it is true,” she says, “except for the people who know you personally who know you wouldn’t have said that.”

But even many of her colleagues just assumed it was true, Stoker says.

“I got e-mails from people who were getting calls asking to comment on the paper,” she recalls. “So there were people who asked for copies of the paper so they could comment” – but there wasn’t any paper.

If there actually had been a paper submitted to Nature, the pre-publication revelations would have been disastrous, Stoker says. “They would have rejected it instantly.”

She worries now that she will find it harder in the future to be published since she has gained the reputation — however unfairly — “as having been talking to the press about our work, unpublished — vetting our work in the press.”

“There’s a very good chance we will not be able to get our paper published because of this.”

‘Constant state of competition’
Along with the damage to her research, Stoker says she feels the incident also hurt her career.

“The problem is these things are taken at face value, by your own management and by the rest of the scientific community,” she says.

“Your success as a scientist depends upon your reputation — your reputation for caution, your reputation for correctness, for publishing the truth, for not making claims you can’t substantiate. If your reputation gets tarnished then that affects your ability to be competitive in the scientific community.”

A scientist must successfully compete in order to survive, Stoker explains.

“You compete for your funding, for your salary, for example, the salary of your staff,” she says. “You make applications to do projects, you write proposals, they get reviewed by panels of your peers, you pass or fail, and you get to do that project or not get to do it on the basis of whether or not you pass that process.

“You’re in a constant state of competition … and every one of those steps is dependent on your reputation as a scientist. So if a journalist makes a claim that is attributed to you, that is not a claim that you made, but everyone else hears that it is, then your reputation is tarnished and it affects that entire thing and it ultimately it affects your livelihood,” she says.

“It affects your ability to do the science, to get the work done, to get any work done.”

Berger, meanwhile, maintains that the story as originally reported was legitimate.

“Our story accurately portrayed what Dr. Stoker told a trusted group of insiders about her research and its implications,” he said in the e-mail to MSNBC.com. “As it happened, we were on the leading edge of what turned out to be a month chock full of intriguing science findings about Mars.”

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