Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. New York: Dial Press, 2006. ISBN 0-385-33612-8.

Summary: A young medical researcher, working with mice in a small laboratory funded by government grants, discovers a promising anti-cancer treatment. But his record-keeping is imperfect, and another team has difficulty reproducing his results. Another researcher, a woman who is both his competitor in the lab and his former lover, accuses him of selectively suppressing his data. She leaves the lab and joins forces with a politicized organization that specialize in exposing dishonesty in scientific research. Both of the researchers and most of their co-workers and acquaintances suffer from the train of events; no one benefits.

The novelist makes the now-conventional choice of not letting the reader know whether the researcher actually did what he is accused of doing. She provides carefully balanced evidence for and against, in order to make the reader complicit in whichever view he takes. So this is not really a novel about the integrity of a scientist; rather, it is about the psychological effects of the cultural pressures under which young researchers work. The lab setting is drawn realistically, and the characters are unusually plausible and complex.

“Hedwig the Owl” provides a more detailed plot summary and praises the novel's authenticity and humanity.