Fraud and the fabric of science (original) (raw)
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This review of an important 460-page book by a professional critic/analyst of modern science alerts us to the dangerous increases in the use of fraud in one of our most admired institutions: Science. We have come to believe that science is infallible because it has self-correcting procedures for detecting and eliminating fraud. The author examines little known cases of fraud from some of the Giants of Science, like Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Robert Millikan, Ernst Haeckel, Sigmund Freud and Cyril Burt. After examining these personal cases, Judson examines the lesser known examples of modern scientific fraud that are more associated with the modern institutions of scientific research. He exposes the flaws and weak assumptions in the present approach to large-scale scientific research that do not halt the growing temptations to fraud. He then turns to the problems of scientific journalism and examines the problems of peer review and plagiarism. Medical and scientific authorities, who have done so little to root out fraud, should all be made to read this book. The general reader will realize that there are "more sinners than saints" hiding behind the walls of science. This might increase their common-sense in responding to Medical Panics that are claimed to have a "scientific" basis.
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The standard definition of scientific fraud involves: fabrication (faking data entirely), falsification (manipulating data in order to make the results look good) and plagiarism (theft of intellectual property). Implicitly, it is assumed that the actions have been done intentionally. Intention also constitutes the boundary between fraud and sloppiness.
Two ways of dealing with scientific fraud
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Science (and society) has only recently tried to come to grips with its exponential growth, most of which is bogus, false, pretentious, bold or irrelevant. Growing research on scientific fraud, of bogus and pseudo-science are telling signs that the need for criticism of science, or for a new sociology of science, has significantly increased in the recent years. But so far, this kind of debunking was considered to be an unglamoroas enterprise. So far, criti cism has mostly followed two paths: by debunking fraudulent research, or by debunking pseu do-scientific claims. Although both types are justified, they do not answer sufficiently the que stion: why so many people believe weird things. My contention is that people believe weird things, among other reasons reviewed by many scholars, because highand hard-sciences give them reasons to. In other words, within high sciences (like astrology), scientists use the same unverified and wild claims as the pseudo-scientists do. Such claims ...
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