Why the epidemic of fraud exists in science today
The Piltdown hoax is one of the most famous cases of fraud in science.1 Many Darwinists, though, claim that this case is an anomaly, and that fraud is no longer a problem today. However, the cases of fraud or deception in the field of evolution include not only the Piltdown Man, but Archaeoraptor, the peppered moth, the Midwife Toad, Haeckel’s embryos, Ancon sheep, the Tasaday Indians, Bathybius haeckelii and Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man)—the missing link that turned out to be a pig.2-8 Actually, fraud as a whole is now ‘a serious, deeply rooted problem’ that affects no small number of contemporary scientific research studies, especially in the field of evolution.9 Scientists have recently been forced by several events to recognize this problem and try to deal with it.10
Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences.11 In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (US Department of Heatlh & Human Services) in the year 2001. This was the third consecutive rise in the number of cases since 1998.12 This concern is not of mere academic interest, but also profoundly affects human health and life.13,14 Much more than money and prestige are at stake—the fact is, fraud is ‘potentially deadly’, and in the area of medicine, researchers are ‘playing with lives’.15 The problem is worldwide. In Australia misconduct allegations have created such a problem that the issue has even been raised in the Australian Parliament, and researchers have called for an ‘office of research integrity’.16
One example is the widely quoted major immunological research studies related to kidney transplantation done by Zoltan Lucas (M.D. from Johns Hopkins and Ph.D. in biochemistry from MIT) that recently were found to contain fraudulent data.17 Dr Lucas was an associate professor of surgery at Stanford University. His graduate student, Randall Morris, discovered that Lucas had written reports on research that Morris knew had not been carried out. The reason Morris knew this was that he was to have been involved in the research! The studies were published in highly reputable journals and, no doubt, many other researchers also relied upon the results for their work. As a result of the modern fraud epidemic, a Nature editorial concluded:
‘Long gone are the days when scientific frauds could be dismissed as the work of the mad rather than the bad. The unhappily extensive record of misconduct suggests that many fraudsters believe their faked results, so attempts at replication by others represent no perceived threat.’18….
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