Someone called my attention to a new piece on Nautilus, “Parasites are us: how biological invaders challenge our notion of self and others” by Robert Levine, who’s identified this way:

Robert V. Levine is a professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno and former president of the Western Psychological Association. His previous books include 
A Geography of Time and The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold.

And the article is described this way:

An excerpt from the book Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self © 2016 by Robert V. Levine, published by Princeton University Press on May 10, 2016.

I was at first chuffed, as Levine’s piece starts out with a longish description of my experience with a botfly larva injected by a mosquito into my head when I was a graduate student doing a summer course in Costa Rica. This story has been recounted in the book Tropical Nature (Forsyth and Miyata 1984), as well as on RadioLab in a piece by Robert Krulwich (see below). Levine’s piece then segues into a nice discussion of how parasites become part of the body of afflicted individuals.

But as I read the piece, and saw the numerous quotations, I became upset, for Levine not only misrepresents quotes as being given to him when they weren’t, but also seems to copy wording from Tropical Nature. 

First, although Levine gives the impression that most of my words that he quotes come from his own interview with me, they’re actually taken, word for word and without attribution, from an interview I did some years ago with Robert Krulwich for RadioLab. That interview,  “Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters” is available on the RadioLab website, and goes from 45:19 extends to 55:45. Here’s an excerpt from Levine’s piece:

The most common treatment where Coyne was living was known as the “meat cure.” He was told to strap a slab of meat—a steak, maybe—to his head. This cuts off the maggot’s air supply, and the maggot, thinking the steak is part of Coyne’s flesh, burrows into it searching for air. Once the maggot gets far enough, he would just have to pull off the steak with the worm in it. It made sense, but Coyne respectfully declined. “The idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day with a T-bone strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do.”

Meanwhile, the symptoms were getting worse. “It’s a terrible itch and from time to time it would like move or twitch and you would feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull or you could feel it grinding up against it,” Coyne recalled. “And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would sort of freak out because its airhole would be cut off, then it would really go nuts. You know, make a lot of pain. So I tried to avoid getting my head under water.”

All of my quotes come directly from the NPR piece, but are unsourced by Levine. The non-quoted parts are also derived from my discussion with Krulwich. The impression throughout the piece is that Levine got the quotes directly from me, which isn’t the case. In fact, the person who sent me the link said that Levine appears to have done a great job interviewing me.

From time to time Levine gives quotes that he says came from his conversation with me, and that may well be true, though I don’t remember talking to him. But those very few quotes are embedded in a much larger group of quotes that taken from RadioLab, but not identified as such. Here’s an example. What I am said to have told Levine is in bold (“Coyne told me”), and the rest of the quotes are taken, word for word, from my interview with Krulwich:

The botfly wasn’t that painful and I knew it was going to come out on its own after a while,”Coyne told me. He decided to just try to enjoy and marvel at what was happening inside him as much as he could.

“This behavior might seem weird to a lay person,” he said, but “I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I’m a geneticist, and here is a fly making its living on me.” Coyne was intrigued to find himself inside a food chain instead of on his usual perch as a consumer at its end. The botfly was fattening up on Coyne, and Coyne was becoming increasingly fond of the botfly. “I was getting more and more curious when it would come out. I didn’t want to kill it.”

And there are unquoted bits that seem to have been taken largely from RadioLab, like this bit from Levine’s piece:

The botfly kept growing. Within a couple of weeks it had become the size of an egg, then a quail egg. Coyne started wearing a baseball cap. One night he was at a Red Sox game at Fenway Park with his friend Sarah Rogerson. .

Here’s what RadioLab says, with my words, and my friend Sarah’s, put in quotation marks, with the rest (not in quotes) being Krulwich’s narration:

So, a couple of weeks passed and the botfly is just getting “bigger and bigger and bigger.” It goes from jellybean size to something like “the size of an egg”. An egg? “Yeah, it was pretty big.” Like a quail egg. Well, he’s covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason they decided to go to Fenway Park.

And here’s one direct quote from me to Levine embedded in a mass of quotes taken directly from the RadioLab interview:

But mostly he wanted to save the fly. He looked at his baby on the pillow and decided to try to rear it into an adult fly. “I’d prepared a jar of sterile sand and I took the worm and dropped it in the sand and put on a top with an airhole,” Coyne said. “But unfortunately it died.” Looking back, he said that he was sorry he “didn’t just put it into a jar of alcohol to preserve it.” Coyne felt extremely sad afterward. “You know in the temperate zone in Boston the botfly is not going to make it. It just can’t live and so it was doomed from the start. I wanted to see it complete its life cycle but unfortunately it didn’t quite make it. I did the best I could with what I knew.” He felt the loss. “It added richness into my life, it really did. People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story even though to me it’s sort of a nice story.” And, he told me, “It was my botfly.”

All quotes here, except for the one in bold, are from the NPR story. Clearly, Levine is implying that all the quotes were given to him by me, but in reality they are taken from NPR. I call that misrepresentation.

Finally, there’s one bit whose wording appears to have been taken from the place where Krulwich got the story: the book Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America (Scribners, 1984) by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, my best friends when I was in graduate school at Harvard. (Ken died in a fishing accident in 1983, and never saw the published book.) In Chapter 13, “Jerry’s Maggot,” they use my botfly tale to begin a discussion of interspecies relationships in the tropics.  Here’s a quote from p. 154 (you can find it on the web here), and the words in quotations are from an email I sent the authors when they asked me to tell them what I remembered about the botfly. The rest of the words are Forsyth and Miyata’s.

Jerry is a biologist. At the time, he was a graduate student at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Well versed in evolutionary logic, genetical theory, Ivy League ecology, and tile use of biometrical tools, he was also aware that his actual experience with living creatures was “limited to unexciting fruit flies crawling feebly around food-filled glass tubes.” Working in the Museum of Comparative Zoology had done little to change that. The Museum was no longer what it had been in the days of its founder, tile celebrated Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, whose constant exhortation to “study Nature, not books” was practiced by all. Jerry’s biological interactions continued to be with fruit flies in a crowded, sterile lab, and tile only animals he saw, aside from his fellow graduate students and the ubiquitous dogs of Cambridge, were the stuffed mammals that resided in the display cases between his office and tile Pepsi machine. Finally, after a winter and spring of listening to some of us urge him to get out of the lab, he enrolled in a field course in tropical ecology. Soon he was jetting to Costa Rica, determined to experience for himself the riches of tropical nature.

And here’s from Levine’s piece. The bits in bold, which are more than my own quotations, bear a remarkable similarity to Forsyth and Miyata’s chapter.

This, however, is a more personal story about Coyne. It goes back to 1973, when he was a mere 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard. As he moved through the program, Coyne was becoming well versed in the intellectual tools of his trade—genetics, evolutionary logic, research methods, and the like. But when it came to real-life contact with nature, his experience was pretty much “limited to unexciting fruit flies crawling feebly around food-filled glass tubes.” He was even more frustrated working at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. This was the same museum that was founded by the great Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, under the guiding philosophy to “study nature, not books.”But, aside from fruit flies in a sterile lab, the only nature Coyne was seeing were stuffed mammals in a display case on his way to the Pepsi machine. When given the opportunity to take a summer field course in tropical ecology in Costa Rica, Coyne didn’t hesitate. He never imagined how close to nature he would get.

That’s annoying, especially the direct lifting of the bits about Louis Agassize, and about the animals between my office and the Pepsi machine, the latter typical of Adrian and Ken’s humor.

I haven’t investigated the piece beyond the bit on my botfly, nor even looked super-closely at the botfly bit. But there’s enough here to make me think that not only is there sloppiness going on—quotes that Levine implies were given to him by me, but in reality were given to Krulwich by me, but also copying of words and ideas from the show and from the book Tropical Nature, and content from RadioLab.

Now it may be that the unattributed quotes in the article are given attribution in the book, but what’s in the article should also have been sourced and explained. And the use of wording from Tropical Nature seems to me to approach plagiarism.

In short, I think this is a combination of sloppiness and possible plagiarism, but wanted to see what readers think.