Plagiarism Reimagined.

Abstract

Once upon a time, scientists wrote with quills, then pens, then typewriters. There was often someone else well trained in the art, often poorly paid, who sat behind the typewriter, working from a yellow paper legal pad, or even from a simple tape recorder. That was the time when one went to the library in person, when copying machines were not available or very expensive, and when one made notes about another paper on an index card, which fitted into a metal box, where it sometimes remained for a long time without being viewed again. It was in that period when I received, in the mail, a request to review a manuscript from the journal Life Sciences. The year before, Marcello Tonini and I had published a paper in the British Journal of Pharmacology,1 which described the hyperpolarizing action of morphine on neurons of the myenteric plexus. This is Auerbach’s plexus, one of the two major ganglionated nerve plexuses in the wall of the intestine: A few years before, working with Syogoro Nishi in Chicago, I had reported the first intracellular recordings from these neurons.2 A short segment of guinea pig ileum had been widely used over the years as an in vitro bioassay for morphine and related compounds: Electrical stimulation of the myenteric neurons caused the release of acetylcholine, which contracted the longitudinal muscle, and this contraction could be readily recorded on a kymograph (smoked drum) or, later, a pen recorder. By studying a wide variety of morphine-like compounds, agonists and antagonists, it had been concluded that the receptor on the myenteric neurons was extremely similar to the receptor through which morphine evinced its analgesic and other effects in man.3 The bioassay had been a key component of the recent identification of the first endogenous opioids, the pentapeptides metand leu-enkephalin.4 The manuscript that came for my review from Life Sciences described the hyperpolarizing action of enkephalins of myenteric neurons, studied by intracellular microelectrode recording. It began: