Chris Blattman

Search
Close this search box.

When scientists sin

in Goodstein’s assessment, “injecting falsehoods into the body of science is rarely, if ever, the purpose of those who perpetrate fraud. They almost always believe that they are injecting a truth into the scientific record.”

…From his investigations Goodstein found three risk factors present in nearly all cases of scientific fraud. The perpetrators, he writes, “1. Were under career pressure; 2. Knew, or thought they knew, what the answer to the problem they were considering would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly; and 3. Were working in a field where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible.”

That is Scientific American on scientific fraud.

Clear-cut cases of fraud include the twin studies of British psychologist Cyril L. Burt (who faked so many twins that he had to fabricate additional twin researchers), the Sloan-Kettering Institute cancer researcher William Summerlin’s experiments on inducing healthy black skin grafts on white mice (which he was caught enhancing with a black felt-tipped pen)

Why We Fight - Book Cover
Subscribe to Blog