Scholarly Misconduct |  | Cases of Known or Suspected Fraud |
|  |  | Source: Broad, William, and Wade, Nicholas (1982). Betrayers of the Truth. Appendix. New York: Simon and Schuster. Known or Suspected Cases of Scientific Fraud Case: Hipparchus (Greek astronomer) Date: Second century B.C. Action: Published star catalog taken from Babylonian sources as if it were the result of his own observations. Reference: G.J. Toomer, “Ptolemy,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1975), p. 191. Case: Claudius Ptolemy (Egyptian astronomer whose theory of the solar system held sway for 1,500 years) Date: Second century A.D. Action: Claimed to have performed astronomical measurements which he did not. Reference: Robert R. Newton, The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1977). Case: Galileo Galilei (physicist and founder of scientific method) Date: Early seventeenth century Action: Exaggerated the outcome of experimental results. Reference: Alexandre Koyre, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1968). Case: Isaac Newton (first modern physicist) Date: 1687-1713 Action: Introduced fudge factors into his magnum opus so as to increase its apparent power of prediction. Reference: Richard S. Westfall, “Newton and the Fudge Factor,” Science, 179, 751-758, 1973. Case: Johann Beringer (German dilettante and collector of fossils) Date: 1726 Action: Hoaxed by rivals in publishing book of fake fossils. Reference: Melvin E. Jahn and Daniel J. Woolf, The Lying Stones of Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1963). Case: Johann Bernoulli (mathematician who refined calculus) Date: 1738 Action: Plagiarized his son’s discovery of the “Bernoulli equation,” backdating his own book so it appeared to have been issued before his son’s. Reference: C. Truesdell, in introduction to Euler’s Opera Omnia, Ser. II, Vol. II, p. xxxv. Case: John Dalton (father of modern atomic theory) Date: 1804-1805 Action: Reported experiments that cannot now be repeated, and which probably could not have happened as described. Reference: Leonard K. Nash, “The Origin of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory,” Isis, 47, 101-116, 1956. Case: Orgueil (a meteorite shower that fell on France) Date: 1864 Action: Unknown hoaxster tampered with piece of meteorite so it seemed to bear organic remains, implying the existence of extraterrestrial life. Reference: Edward Anders et al., “Contaminated Meteorite,” Science, 146, 1157-1161, 1964. Case: Gregor Mendel (father of genetics) Date: 1865 Action: Published statistical results too good to be true. Reference: Several papers in Curt Stern and Eva R. Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book (W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1966). Case: Admiral Peary (American explorer) Date: 1909 Action: Alleged he had reached the geographical North Pole when in fact he knew he was hundreds of miles away. Reference: Dennis Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction? (Robert B. Luce, Washington-New York, 1973). Case: Robert Millikan (American physicist and winner of Nobel Prize) Date: 1910-1913 Action: Kept unfavorable results out of published papers while publicly maintaining that he had reported everything. Reference: Gerald Holton, “Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 9, 166-224, 1978. Case: Piltdown Date: 1912 Action: Hoaxster planted fake fossils in gravel pit, presumably to cast Britain as birthplace of the human race. Reference: J.S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (Oxford University Press, London, 1955). Case: Adriaan van Maanen (American astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory) Date: 1916 Action: Misreported the reliability of key astronomical observations. Reference: Norriss S. Hetherington, Beyond the Edge of Objectivity, unpublished book MS. Case: Paul Kammerer (Viennese biologist) Date: 1926 Action: Kammerer or assistant faked breeding results with toads. Reference: Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad (Hutchinson, London, 1971). Case: Cyril Burt (English psychologist) Date: 1943(?)-1966 Action: Fabricated data to support theory that human intelligence is 75 percent inherited. Reference: L.S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1979, 370 pp. Case: James H. McCrocklin (president of Southwest Texas State College from 1964-1969) Date: 1954 Action: Pirated parts of old report in Ph.D. thesis. Reference: Texas Observer, March 7, 1969, pp. 6-8. Case: “Traction” (pseudonym) Date: 1960-1961 Action: A young researcher falsified work at Yale, then was hired by Fritz Lipmann at the Rockefeller Institute, where he published falsified work with Lipmann and was eventually found out. Reference: William J. Broad, “Fraud and the Structure of Science,” Science, 212, 137-141, 1981. Case: P.G. Pande, R.R. Shukla, and P.C. Sekariah (at Indian Veterinary Research Institute) Date: 1961 Action: Claimed to have discovered parasite in hens’ eggs, but photomicrographs had been lifted from another publication. Reference: The editorial board of Science, “An Unfortunate Event,” Science, 134, 945-946, 1961. Case: “Fraley” (pseudonym) Date: 1964 Action: A visiting professor in David E. Green’s University of Wisconsin lab faked several important experiments leading Green to announce retractions at a national meeting. Reference: Joseph Hixon, The Patchwork Mouse (Doubleday, New York, 1976), pp. 146-148. Hixon refers to the perpetrator of the frauds as Fraley. Case: Robert Gullis (biochemist from Birmingham University) Date: 1971-1976 Action: Faked series of experiments on messenger chemicals used by the brain. Reference: Mike Muller, “Why Scientists Don’t Cheat,” New Scientist, June 2, 1977, pp. 522-523. Case: Walter J. Levy (parapsychologist and protege of father of parapsychology, J.B. Rhine) Date: 1974 Action: Faked results of experiment in which rats were to influence equipment by brain power, a phenomenon known as psychokinesis. Reference: J.B. Rhine, “ A New Case of Experimenter Un reliability,” Journal of Parapsychology, 38, 215-255, 1974. Case: William Summerlin (immunologist) Date: 1974 Action: In an attempt to bolster research that was under fire, Summerlin faked results of skin transplants with mice. Reference: Joseph Hixon, The Patchwork Mouse (Doubleday, New York, 1976). Case: Stephen S. Rosenfeld (undergraduate researcher at Harvard) Date: 1974 Action: Forged letters of recommendation and allegedly faked series of experiments in biochemistry. Reference: Robert Reinhold, “When Methods Are Not So Scientific;” The New York Times, December 29, 1974, p. E7. Case: Zoltan Lucas (surgeon at Stanford University) Date: 1975 Action: Admitted to faking citations to research papers of his that did not exist. Some of the fakery was aimed at winning NIH grants. Reference: Series of news releases put out by Stanford University News Service, August, 1981. Case: Wilson Crook III (graduate student in geology at University of Michigan) Date: 1977 Action: Regents at the university in 1980 rescinded Crook’s master’s degree, saying that he had fraudulently claimed to have discovered a natural mineral called “texasite,” which in reality was a synthetic compound. Crook denied the charges. Reference: Max Gates, “Regents Rescinds Student’s Degree, Charging Fraud,” The Ann Arbor News, October 18, 1980, p. A9. Case: Marc J. Straus (cancer researcher at Boston University) Date: 1977-1978 Action: Group of Straus’ researchers and nurses admitted falsifying data in clinical tests and charged that some of the fakery was done on Straus’ orders. Straus denied any wrongdoing. Reference: Nils J. Bruzelius and Stephen A, Kurkjian, “Cancer Research Data Falsified; Boston Project Collapses,” Boston Globe, five- part series starting June 29, 1980, p. 1. Case: Elias A.K. Alsabti (Iraqi medical student who worked at several research centers in the United States) Date: 1977-1980 Action: Plagiarized scientific papers, perhaps sixty in all. Reference: William J. Broad, “Would-be Academician Pirates Papers,” Science, 208, 1438-1440, 1980. Case: Stephen Krogh Derr (radiation chemist at Hope College in Holland, Michigan) Date: 1978 Action: Published allegedly invented results of remarkable treatment said to remove plutonium from the bodies of poisoned workers. Reference: Lawrence McGinty, “Researcher Retracts Claims on Plutonium Treatment,” New Scientist, October 4, 1979, pp. 3-4. Case: John Long (research pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital) Date: 1978-1980 Action: Forged data in the course of a research career spent studying cell lines that turned out to not come from humans but from a brown-footed Columbian owl monkey. Reference: Nicolas Wade, “A Diversion of the Quest for Truth,” Science, 211, 1022-1025, 1981. Case: Vijay R. Soman (biomedical researcher at Yale) Date: 1978-1980 Action: Falsified results in three papers, threw away raw data in others, forcing retraction of twelve papers in all. Reference: Morton Hunt, “A Fraud that Shook the World of Science,” The New York Times Magazine, November 1, 1981, pp. 42-75. Case: Mark Spector (rising young biochemist at Cornell University) Date: 1980-1981 Action: A series of elegant experiments by Spector that pointed to a unified theory of cancer causation turned out to be fakes. Spector denied any wrongdoing, saying somebody else spiked the test tubes. Reference: Nicholas Wade, “The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Superstar,” New Scientist, September 24, 1981, pp. 781-782. Case: M. J. Purves (physiologist at University of Bristol) Date: 1981 Action: Falsified work presented in paper to International Congress of Physiological Science. Retracted paper, resigned his post after university investigation Reference: “Scientific Fraud: In Bristol Now,” Nature, 294, 509, 1981. Case: John R. Darsee (cardiologist at Harvard Medical School) Date: 1981 Action: Admitted faking one experiment and blue-ribbon committee found two others highly suspect. Reference: William J. Broad, “Report Absolves Harvard in Case of Fakery,” Science, 215, 874-876, 1982. Case: Arthur Hale (immunologist at Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University) Date: 1981 Action: Investigation by Wake Forest officials found Hale faked one experiment and did not have adequate raw data for twenty others. Hale resigned, denying any wrongdoing. Reference: Several articles by Winston Cavin, Greensboro News & Record, January 31, 1982.”
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