History has shown that, despite their claim to tell only the truth, if not the whole truth, the sciences are a prime breeding ground for fraud. This term covers the fabrication or alteration of data, as well as plagiarism.
History has shown that, despite their claim to tell only the truth, if not the whole truth, the sciences are a prime breeding ground for fraud. This term covers the fabrication or alteration of data, as well as plagiarism. Without minimizing the seriousness of plagiarism for scientific probity, we will only consider here the production of fakes, i.e. results that do not conform to experience and the truth of the facts. These results may be deliberately invented or "merely" altered to conform to a demonstration. The most famous and often cited cases involve the fabrication of data to proclaim an unproven thesis. The forger's motives are varied. For example, the fossil of a human skull and a monkey jaw (Piltdown Man) made the paleontological headlines in 1910, but its author was never discovered: this was a fraudster who made no personal profit from his deception. Other fraudsters seem to act out of ideology, such as the psychologist Cyril Burt, who in the 1970s demonstrated, on the basis of controversial studies on twins, that IQ is hereditary. There are also compulsive fraudsters, such as Jan Hendrick Schön, a German physicist who published no less than one scientific article every week in 1961...