Blinded by science

Today, the WaPo has an interesting article on fraudelent scientific research. The article states last year 265 claims were filed with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

How many of us would even have thought there was a federal agency that existed for dealing with such a "relatively rare" thing?

What brought this into focus was the reports last month that a South Korean scientist had faked his data on cloning stem cells. Recently, the chap confessed, while blaming others -- Bill Clinton probably chuckled knowingly, while biting his scarred lower lip.

The Post's article highlights some good ones:

Last year, a University of Vermont nutrition researcher who had millions of dollars in federal grants pleaded guilty to faking research on menopause and aging.

In the 1990s, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory falsely claimed they had discovered two atomic elements. In the 1980s there was John Darsee, the Harvard cardiologist who filled more than 100 journal articles with phony data.

And virtually every scientist today knows of William Summerlin, the brazen Memorial Sloan-Kettering scientist who in the 1970s blackened his white mice with a permanent marker to make it look as if skin transplants from black mice had been successful.

Even Gregor Mendel, the revered Austrian monk, is today widely believed to have cooked his numbers and not just his peas, which he used to derive the principles of modern genetics.

Last October, ORI concluded that Xiaowu Li of the University of California at San Francisco falsified three images in a published paper by using old photos of mouse melanoma cells and saying they were human pancreatic cancer cells.

Last June, ORI found that Jason W. Lilly of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University electronically replicated the image of a single genetic assay and then altered the copies so they would appear to be multiple assays.

In November 2004, ORI found that Ali Sultan of the Harvard School of Public Health plagiarized from another researcher's work and, when he came under suspicion, fabricated portions of an e-mail from his postdoctoral student in an apparent effort to falsely implicate the student.

In September 2004, ORI determined that Charles N. Rudick of Northwestern University used a photo-altering program to change the appearance of recorded nerve signals.

The one that surprised me that was left out was Pons-Fleischmann's cold fusion reactor in the mason jar and the researcher at MIT that "confirmed" their results. But I guess that wasn't an ORI case.