When Science Goes Wrong by Simon Levay Page B

newspaper accounts, the hospital’s action was provoked by a laundry list of misbehaviours, starting in 1992 with an episode of ‘inappropriate language and inappropriate touching’. In 1994, Iacono allegedly used some drugs that were not approved by the FDA. This was followed in 1998 by ‘yelling and abusive behaviour toward staff’, which earned him an official reprimand and six months of anger-management therapy. In May 1999, Iacono was said to have become angry with a scrub technician in the operating room, and to have grabbed her hand, causing an injury. In the spring of 2000, according to the allegations, he told a nurse, within earshot of a deceased patient’s family, that she had ‘killed’ the patient. And at some unspecified time, Iacono was accused of having allowed a medically unqualified nurse practitioner to drill holes through patients’ skulls.
    Following the loss of his surgical privileges at Loma Linda, Iacono applied for privileges at another hospital, Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs. But, according to the California Medical Board, Iacono falsely answered ‘no’ to a question about whether he had ever had his surgical privileges suspended or revoked. Because of this and the other alleged actions by Iacono, the Medical Board brought a formal accusation against him in 2004, and in September 2005 Iacono was ordered to surrender his medical licence, meaning that his medical career in California was over. Two years later, while flying alone from Los Angeles to Mississippi, he crashed into a mountainside in New Mexico and was killed. He was 55 years old.
     
     
    Why did Truex agree to participate in a project that he must have realised was hazardous in the extreme, and which quite likely killed him? Why did he agree to be operated on by someone who had absolutely no previous experience in this kind of work, in an absurdly remote location, and without any kind of regulatory control? In part, of course, it was simply his desperate desire for relief from his incurable and progressive illness. But also, he placed a great deal of trust in Iacono. He was a family friend, after all. And Iacono, whatever failings he may have had, was an extraordinarily vivid and persuasive talker. At our meeting in 2000, after lecturing me for several hours Iacono left the room and a medical student who had been sitting in on our meeting turned to me and said, ‘You haven’t seen him at his finest. He gets very dynamic – a very charismatic fellow!’
    Then Iacono popped back in and said to me, hopefully in jest, ‘My Mafia friends can track you down and cut your tongue out if this doesn’t work out for us.’

 
     
    METEOROLOGY: All Quiet on the Western Front
     
     
     
     
    ‘EARLIER ON TODAY, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard that there’s a hurricane on the way,’ said Britain’s best-known weatherman, Michael Fish, on an October evening in 1987. ‘Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry – there isn’t.’ Then the hurricane struck. Eighteen people died, and losses mounted into the billions.
    That, at least, is a synopsis of events as they have engraved themselves in the memory of Britons who survived the Great Storm of October 15 and 16, 1987. Fish himself sees it all a bit differently. He was talking about the weather in America. The videotape was doctored. The French let him down. His forecast wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t even on duty that evening. And there was no hurricane.
    Untangling what actually transpired before and during the storm presents quite a challenge. For one thing, meteorology is an arcane science. Take the term ‘baroclinic instability,’ a key concept in the analysis of the 1987 storm. A baroclinic instability is the condition when isobaric-isopycnal solenoids are nonzero. Got it? I think not.
    Also, as befits an arcane science, its practitioners stick together like glue. The debacle of October 16 – if it was a debacle – was followed by an