Some Facts About Science Fraud

I found an article in Discover Magazine. It listed 20 things you didn’t know about science fraud from the past and the present. I want to share several with you.

1. Chinese scientists were three times more likely to commit fraud as compared to Americans while French scientists were the least likely to commit fraud.

2. Issac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia which is considered the greatest physics text ever written. Even Freud, Darwin and Pasteur seemed to have altered data.

3. In the 1980s, psychologist Stephen Breuning published results from fictitious trials of tranquilizers; his findings affected the clinical practice for treating mentally retarded children.

4. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity estimates that there are 2,300 cases of misconduct among NIH-funded researchers every year.

So…can we really trust studies that are reported in the medical journals? The problem is we don’t know which studies are true and can be relied upon and which have been falsified.