Originally Posted by
genejockey
This is the problem with the internet - it makes everything available to everyone, but doesn't teach you how to evaluate it. And even peer review assumes your data are real, so actual fraud can slip through and get published, and only later when nobody can replicate the results will it be exposed.
When I was at Cornell, there was a graduate student who was the star of the department, and published a series of papers in top flight journals, and ALL OF IT was bulls**t. Literally made up from whole cloth, and the data faked, including gels and autorads. He worked hard at it, possibly harder than he'd have had to work to get ACTUAL results.
During my fellowship, my best buddy published a string of very high profile stuff, including a paper in
Science, some of which I was on and most of which was at least partially fake. A smart journal reviewer figured out one of his little frauds and told our boss, who panicked and decided to keep it all hidden and play dumb if the authorities ever found out. This boy also dicked me around in a hundred ways which only became apparent later, including inviting me to his European lab as a visiting professor when we were junior faculty and then sticking me with the bill, which I had to pay out of pocket because he promised travel for my wife and kid plus an honorarium, and I did it as outside activity.
He went on to a chaired professorship and vice-deanship at Harvard Medical School, where the hanky-panky continued. A few years ago, he got busted for sexual inappropriateness (a chronic issue with him, I later found out) and lost all his NIH support. However, it was kept absolutely hermetically silent by HMS and they shifted him to another slightly less fancy position. My old boss, that reviewer, and other people who know never stopped doing business with him and inviting him to ****. People all over the world still line up to kiss his ass, although lots of them detest him.
That made me pretty cynical about science as an institution, even though it has put lots of food on the table over the years.