Science rife with notable fakes

Columbia- The revelation that an MU researcher committed research fraud doesn’t surprise Gordon Christensen, who chaired the committee that investigated the charges against Kaushik Deb.

“It would be nice to say this doesn’t happen often,” Christensen said. “But it has happened in a number of well-publicized cases across the world and in leading institutions.”

Indeed, the history of science is filled with notable fakers in the mold of Deb, a post-doctoral fellow at MU who falsified images of mouse embryos that accompanied peer reviewed research published in Science magazine.

In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced that they had created a sustained nuclear reaction at room temperature in their lab at the University of Utah. The duo was forced to retract their findings after other prominent researchers accused them of falsifying their data. More recently, in 2006, a South Korean researcher was forced to admit that he had fabricated data in two landmark papers on embryonic stem cells.

Like those researchers, Deb was, by his supervisor’s accounts, a talented researcher who appeared to make a startling discovery, only to be challenged and exposed as a fraud. And, like those more notorious researchers, Deb’s ambitions likely brought about his downfall.

“In the majority of cases, I think it is out of sheer desperation,” said Robert Hall, MU’s associate vice chancellor for research and director of compliance. “When you’re on a post-doctoral track, you’ve got a couple, three years to produce research that will get the attention of your superiors. We’re putting someone in a position where if they falter and if they fail, they’re dead.”

Christensen thinks that the pressure placed on research scientists ultimately comes from their funding sources.

“There’s something wrong with the way we fund research today,” he said, “The research community is too results oriented. The granting agencies and supervisors are too concerned with the number of articles published as a measurement of success.”

There are other ways of measuring research productivity that funding agencies could use. Christensen suggested assessing the impact and quality of an article, and said there should be more avenues by which to publish unsuccessful research.

Although pressure to please sponsors can explain why a researcher would fudge facts, it still doesn’t account for how they would go about it, especially with the scientific community’s commitment to verification and authenticity. Christensen said he thinks supervisors are given too heavy a load and could not possibly give individual attention to all of the researchers in their charge.