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| Piltdown man |
Fraudulent
activity is not exclusive of politicians and the world of finances, though
perhaps it is more widespread in those fields. It also affects scientists, who,
like every human being, are prone to temptation and sometimes (surprisingly
rarely) fall into it. The reasons are the usual: ambition, fame and the unbearable
pressure to publish results.
The first
thing we must do is find out what is fraud and what it is not. According to the
criteria used in the United States, there are just two essentially fraudulent
scientific activities: plagiarism and the invention or falsification of
experimental results. The following activities are questionable, but not fraud:
mistaking speculation with fact; incorrect use of statistical procedures; seeking
approval after the fact for ethically controversial experiments. Finally, the
following activities must not be considered fraudulent or questionable:
judgment errors, differences of opinion in the interpretation of data, or involuntary
errors in their analysis.
Let’s
consider a hypothetical case. A scientist repeats four times the same experiment.
Three of them give the same result, the other one is different. To improve the
presentation of his results and ensure publication, in his article he eliminates
the divergent experiment and refers only to the other three. This may be a
small fraud, but it is certainly a fraud. Einstein said: The right
to seek the truth implies also a duty: one must conceal no part of what one
recognizes to be the truth.
A few scientific
frauds are famous and have been described often, so I will just mention them,
adding a list of a few relatively recent purported frauds.
•
In
the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer attempted to prove the inheritance
of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism) against Darwin's theory. A fraud was
discovered when it was ascertained that the hands of the midwife toad had been
stained with India ink. The actual fraud could have been performed by an
assistant, worried about the scientific prestige of his leader.
•
The
Piltdown Man, the English missing link for man, was built in 1912 with a modern
human skull and the jaw of an orangutan. Over a century later, there is still controversy
about who was the author of the fraud.
•
The
spectacular results obtained by Franz Moewus in the 1940s in the field of
molecular biology were based on a set of apparently imaginary experiments.
•
In
his analysis of the influences on intelligence (inheritance or
environment and education), Cyril Burt, then considered one of the most eminent
British psychologists, published studies on identical twins educated separately,
which seemed to decide the issue in favor of genetic inheritance. Years after
his death, it was found that, of the 119 pairs of twins supposedly studied by Burt,
only the first 15 were real; all the others had been invented. Burt seems to have performed other minor frauds,
such as sending letters, reviews and notes under a pseudonym to the magazine of
which he was editor (the British Journal of Psychology), citing himself and thus
increasing the impact factor of his scientific papers.
•
In
1974, the American immunologist Summerling announced he had managed to transplant
in black mice the skin of albino mice without causing rejection. When his results
were questioned, he was caught red-handed while dyeing white the hair of a
mouse.
•
In
1986, Claudio Milanese, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University,
acknowledged having manipulated the results of an experiment that led to the
publication of the discovery of a nonexistent molecule (interleukin-4A).
•
In
an analysis conducted between 1977 and 1988 by the US FDA, serious deficiencies
were detected in many reports and laboratory data of researchers hired by
pharmaceutical companies to study experimental drugs, such as data
manipulation, lack of patient consent, or incorrect scientific protocols. 395
cases were studied thoroughly, for they presented particularly serious
deficiencies. In 63 cases the FDA took disciplinary measures against the
researchers.
•
Between
1989 and 1991, the government of the United States analyzed 200 possible cases
of scientific misconduct. In 30 of them, the suspicion was confirmed.
•
Between
1992 and 1999, Nordic federal agencies investigated 37 cases of scientific
misconduct. Just 9 were confirmed.
•
In
1999 a fossil was discovered in China, an apparent missing link between
dinosaurs and birds. It was called Archaeoraptor and was widely
publicized by National Geographic. It was later discovered that the fossil had
been built with the head of the extinct bird Yanomis, the tail of a Microraptor
and the legs of a third species.
•
In
1999 Victor Ninov and colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab announced their
success in creating elements 116 and 118 for the first time. In 2002, a panel
concluded that Ninov had intentionally manipulated data. Although he denied the
charge, Ninov was fired.
•
In
2000 Robert Tracy, a member of Michael Lieber’s team, confessed having
manipulated the data to show the role of hybrid DNA and RNA in the synthesis of
antibodies. His colleagues had to withdraw the paper from the journal.
•
In
2002 a panel of Lucent Technologies accused Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Labs of
having manipulated molecular electronics experiments that seemed to have led to
a cascade of discoveries: a transistor made of a single molecule; plastic
transistors; superconducting transistors... The manipulated data had polluted 25
scientific articles, including several in Nature and Science. Schön was fired.
•
In
2004 the Korean Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University announced that he had
successfully cloned human embryonic stem cells. The journal Science published
two papers. In late 2005, this research was questioned, Hwang was charged with
fraud and expelled from the university, and Science retracted both papers.
•
In
an article published in The Lancet in 2005, Jon Sudbø of the Norwegian Radium
Hospital and the University of Oslo published a study showing that ibuprofen
reduces the risk of mouth cancer in smokers. Accused of fraud, Sudbø admitted
having invented the 908 patients mentioned in the paper.
 |
| David Baltimore |
Not every
purported scientific frauds are frauds. In this connection, as everywhere else, one must be exquisitely
scrupulous to assure the presumption of innocence. In 1986, the Nobel Prize
David Baltimore endorsed a paper of his collaborator Thereza Imanishi-Kari on the
insertion of genes in mice. Margot O’Toole, a postdoctoral fellow of the team,
accused Thereza of having manipulated the experimental data. For a while, it
seemed that the accusation had a base. In 1991, Baltimore was forced to resign
as president of the Rockefeller University in New York. In 1994, Imanishi-Kari
was declared guilty of 19 charges of scientific misconduct by a panel of the
Office of Research Integrity (ORI). In 1996, however, a federal appeals panel decided
that the ORI analysis had been irrelevant, incredible or uncorroborated, and declared
Imanishi-Kari innocent of the 19 charges. By then, however, after ten years of
struggle, Thereza had abandoned her research career.
Manuel Alfonseca
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