WHEN A HARVARD team of biochemists lept into national attention in December with the announcement that their undergraduate co-worker was letter-forger and that their recent breakthroughs in cancer-related immunology might also be bogus, all sorts of interesting people around the University began running for cover.

Because the shit--the unavoidable fact that science at Harvard might not be so hallowed and immune to social pressures as science elsewhere--had hit the fan.

University Hall divided its time between disciplining and protecting the student and handling the press (both local and national) so as to minimize the damage to fair Harvard's reputation. The Biochemistry Department had summoned the student, Steven S. Rosenfeld '75, before its members for a 'fessing up, and now caucused furiously to advise the research team on what its course of action should be. The professor involved, David H. Dressler, assistant professor of Biochemistry, and his graduate assistant in the three-man team, Huntington Potter '72, had decided to report to the Administrative Board only the fact of Rosenfeld's five or more forgeries to medical schools, fellowship committees, and Phi Beta Kappa. That was all.

The contents of the letters, and the qualms the two had been having since April (the last time their experiments dealing with "transfer factor" had worked out right) about their publicized research's integrity, Dressler and Potter had withheld as privy information. Now, feeling that as teachers, and human beings, they had met their responsibility to a student, peer and friend of over two years, the two biochemists had to turn to their responsibility as scientists: salvaging professional integrity--but not saving face--by publicly airing their doubts about their own work.

Colleagues in the Bio Labs on Divinity Ave., including the people who would control the future of a non-tenured junior faculty member and an aspiring graduate student, urged them to save their own skins. Writing letters of retraction to the prestigious journals in which their work had appeared allowed plenty of leeway for casting in ferences and aspersions, and generally pinning the tail of a doomed career on the donkey (Rosenfeld). By immediately dropping all work on transfer factor, a controversial substance postulated in the 1950's for transfering immunity against foreign substances from one animal to another, Dressler and Potter might successfully sever themselves from the scandal.

FROM HIS sabbatical retreat in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., Nobel laureate James D. Watson, professor of Molecular Biology, offered further incentive for dumping on the kid, pressing Dressler to "stop working on this at once and turn your attention to something else." Of course, Watson was no impartial observer. He, Dressler and others were working from the same pool of National Institute of Health and American Cancer Society grants, and he himself had sponsored the articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, America's equivalent of the Royal Society. Watson's New York friends, he admitted, had caught wind of "another Sloan-Kettering affair" (an April 1974 incident in which a cancer researcher named Summerlin at Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York was caught tampering with skin-graft data, and given a psychiatric leave) at Harvard.

And the inimitable Dr. Watson didn't want that wind splattering any egg on his shirt. Watson insisted, and rightfully, that as the Academy member "sponsor" he only initiated the scientific-refereeing system and was figuratively, as well as literally, 300 miles away from the experiments and responsibility for their accuracy. But, curiously, Watson also seemed to know enough about the findings to be the first to declare them invalid and untrue, contradicting the testimony of an admittedly disgraced Rosenfeld that they were legitimate, and ignoring conventional scientific folk wisdom that failure to replicate results can as easily result from unknown changes in conditions, materials and preparations as they can from mysterious tamperings.

Rejecting such advice, Dressler and Potter opted for a marty-like stance, issuing a curt, 110-word tentative retraction that avoided all mention of Rosenfeld or their own difficulties, and promising to keep working to get active "preps" of transfer factor during the next three months. They are still working to get a positive "take," though they have met with no success and have moved the focus of their research elsewhere. The chances of vindicating Rosenfeld and justifying two years of work grow dimmer by the day.

"Your integrity is everything in this business. And when you lose that, everything you've done is in question," a frazzled, enemic-looking Dressler told members of his lab at the height of the crisis. There is surely no logic to falsifying data, he kept saying, in order to "get published" in the prestige scientific journals, since the whole idea of such journals is to have other people repeat your presumably "successful" procedures and spread the wealth of knowledge.

YET IF THERE is no logic to the Rosenfeld case in a framework of traditional values, that may be because the organization of scientific research and development in this country isn't exactly logical. Some Harvard administrators attributed his "ill logic" in the recommendations forgeries to the pressures of the pre-med syndrome; some of his friends chalked it up to a success-oriented family background; some of his teachers and fellow students in the Bio Labs, and even Rosenfeld himself, blamed the cumulative effect of spending endless hours in the laboratory and classroom.

The research has also evoked a barrage of none-too-piercing explanations. Editors of the journals involved (PNAS and the Annals of Internal Medicine) dismissed the case as an "embarrassing, but isolated" incident. Some, like Watson, linked, "transfer factor" to a whole chain of precedents in the history of science. "There are many claims in the literature on transfer factor that, like lots of other bizarre phenomena in the past, haven't panned out--but just because a lot of people find it hard to believe is no reason for not putting it forward," he opined.

But the skewed priorities of high-powered research in America, and the probable cache of shoddy work as yet uncovered, are more than the work of grant-dispensing bureaucrats and diabolical scientists. Scientists and citizens must recognize the social basis of science, band together and establish public control of research allocations, and procedures for poer-evaluation and review. Only a new scientific ethic, applied socially, will enable the old, self imposed restraints to start working again.