academic fraud

[myun]

This is the biggest fraud that I have ever witnessed. If you guys are going to pursue grad school for a PhD, I think you have to read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/science/26FRAU.html

That guy just ruined his life in academia because he violated one of the most important academic precepts: integrity. Sometimes being truthful is more important than publishing smashing academic papers.

[Erin]

Just read it. Yeah, that's pretty scary. Apparently, he believed in his results though.

Thanks for the links, and thanks for promoting integrity. I think that's unfortunately lacking in many parts of our lives.

[myun]

Erin, I also think that integrity is violated in many parts of our lives, and academia is no exception, unfortunately. But I do believe that this scandal was an exceptional case. Although this guy claims that he observed the result himself, it is extremely difficult to believe his words; there is no proof at all that he had any of his raw data that he claimed to have collected, and there was no one who witnessed his experiment. (Not even single one of his 20 or so co-authors! Talking of integrity... I have to wonder what these co-authors were thinking when they endorsed their papers.) Plus, there were 100 or so experimental groups who have been trying to reproduce his results for the past couple years, but nobody could. Finally, when he was finally being investigated, he could not reproduce any of his claimed results in front of the investigation team. In other words, all circumstances indicate that he fabricated data that were not even observed, and he most likely could not have believed in his data in the first place.

The scary thing is that he thought he could get away with it! (He is only 32, virtually a new kid in academia, and that is the sad part.)