Science Cheats: A Reading List on Unscrupulous Scientists
August 14, 2025 at 03:30PM
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I spend a good chunk of my typical workweek reading scientific papers. They often help fortify the articles I write as a journalist. Yet how many of those papers can I really trust? I scrutinize the work as best I can. I talk to independent sources and use the review website PubPeer to check for flagged papers. Yet I’m aware of my limitations as a nonspecialist. I worry about getting things wrong: What if I help perpetuate unsound science and this ends up hurting people?
I admire and, as we all do, depend on the work of scientists. But they’re imperfect, and they exist in a world that tends to reward the quantity and newsworthiness of their publications. When promotions or prestige are dependent on how many papers you churn out, inevitably some researchers will try to game the system.
There’s a tricky balance to strike here. On one hand, it’s critical to root out research fraud and serious errors. On the other hand, highlighting the most dramatic outliers risks creating the impression that science as a whole can’t be trusted. Research-integrity sleuths—the people who pore over research papers, working out whether images or text have been copied, or whether impossible results are being reported—are well aware of this dilemma. They worry about their work being weaponized to defund and discredit science.
Ultimately, as trust in science and scientists declines, and as misinformation spreads, it’s more important than ever to distinguish between rigorous science and work that takes shortcuts. That includes government sources: For the Make Our Children Healthy Again report published in May 2025, the Make America Healthy Again Commission used AI, which ended up citing several invented papers.
This isn’t just academic. Assessments like this help determine where to spend increasingly scarce research funds. Not to mention that doctors relying on flawed medical research can be a matter of life or death.
“Failure at Every level”: How Science Sleuths Exposed Massive Ethics Violations at a Famed French Institute (Cathleen O’Grady, Science, March 2024)
During the panicked early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were hungry for miracle cures. When a French team reported in March 2020 that antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine helped reduce viral load in COVID-19 patients, their paper immediately attracted attention from reporters and politicians around the world.
But the pandemic also gave science-minded people the time to carefully review research results. And what they found disturbed them. Six patients had dropped out—a significant number for a study involving 20 participants. One of those six patients had died. The paper had been fast-tracked to publication, making it challenging to carry out a proper review. Yet even after the French medical authorities withdrew permission to use hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, and as other scientists reported that it was linked to higher death rates in COVID-19 patients, the French researchers would go on to use the drug with thousands of COVID-19 patients.
This Science investigation unravels the systematic problems at the research hospital where the hydroxychloroquine study took place. It also highlights the dogged work of outside scientists, teachers, and journalists who questioned the institute’s research history. They found and publicized patterns of ethical lapses and improperly vetted research, even in the face of insults and lawsuits. As a result, the research institute was investigated and the research director barred from practicing medicine. This is a dispiriting story of institutional failure. But it’s also a hopeful story of what a team of volunteers can accomplish in response.
The close relationship between political powers and scientific institutions in France is also to blame for the foot-dragging institutional response, Lacombe says. Without external voices—like Bik, Frank, Besançon, Molimard, and Garcia—“I’m not sure that things would have moved,” she says.
Frank worries the lackluster response sends a message that there are no consequences for violations like these. “Maybe tomorrow—I hope not—we’ll have SARS-3 … and the message sent will be, ‘Don’t worry about public health. Just show your face, say anything you want, and you will sell books, be famous, and get a lot of fans.’ It’s insane.”
Science Fiction in University Labs? (Jackson Ryan, The Monthly, September 2023)
Science whistleblowers aren’t always celebrated. All too often, junior scientists who call out suspect research practices are ignored. Worse, their careers may suffer.
In 2007, as a postdoctoral researcher, Ying Morgan joined an Australian lab that had received substantial funding to study an experimental drug called Dz13. Over time she started to lose confidence in the drug, which she’d been studying for effects on skin cancer. Tumor cells did not always stop growing after applying Dz13—at least in her own research. In other research at her lab, it was consistently beneficial. The results puzzled her. She raised the discrepancies with the university administration, but Dz13 continued into a human clinical trial.
Outside the lab, the scientific-integrity researcher David Vaux questioned certain images in the lab’s papers. Though they referred to different experiments, the images were identical. He also found manipulated images in the lab’s research, which finally led to investigation. An independent panel learned that the lab’s head had recreated a lab book that he passed off as original data. Eventually several papers were retracted, and the lab moved on from Dz13 research. As for Morgan, she no longer does lab research.
[Morgan] wanted to see evidence. It was no longer about whether her name ended up in the author list of a scientific paper. She knew clinical trials of Dz13 would soon begin, and the drug would be injected into humans for the first time. In her experiments, she’d recorded instances of inflammation in the lungs of mice injected with Dz13. It was a side effect she was worried might repeat in human trials.
Her back-and-forth with Khachigian over authorship also included a pointed question. In an email on March 24, 2010, she reminded Khachigian of an interaction the two had while she was still in his lab. Khachigian had asked her in a previous email, given what she knew about the drug’s effect on basal and squamous cell carcinomas, if she’d be willing to take part in a clinical trial of Dz13.
“I answered very clearly,” she wrote. “No.”
A Researcher Who Publishes a Study Every Two Days Reveals the Darker Side of Science (Manuel Ansede, El PaÃs, June 2023)
This article explores the rise of astonishingly prolific researchers in Spain. One admitted to El PaÃs that he lacks expertise in some of the topics on which he’s published. Others said that they had no way of knowing if their coauthors, whom they had never met, had engaged in questionable research practices.
Paper mills, or companies that offer services including pre-written papers, have facilitated dishonesty in the research world. This business model thrives under two parallel incentives: Academic publishers collect publication fees from authors, while researchers benefit professionally from publications. If both sides are uninterested in excellence, this can result in low-quality, even fraudulent research papers. Scientists plugging away at research in good faith can be disheartened by seeing cheaters prosper. Yet as this article outlines, publishers, universities, and government science bodies may all have an interest in sweeping problems under the rug.
“We’re losing millions of euros of public money paying for the publication of studies that usually don’t contribute anything — like parrots, they only repeat what everyone already knew about,” laments Delgado Vázquez, from the Pablo de Olavide University, in Seville…
“It’s not necessary to generalize, but in our universities, we all know of a professor whose curriculum has grown mysteriously—in a very short period of time—and who is managing to be promoted in an unusually short period of time. The rot is there. Whoever doesn’t smell it is covering their nose,” says Delgado Vázquez.
Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled with Its Blood-Test Technology (John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal, October 2015)
Of course, scientific misconduct occurs outside of universities too. In the private sector, chasing profit can lead to dangerously overhyping research in progress. Theranos is one of the most notorious cases; the company was a tech startup that promised it could deliver a trove of medical information from very little blood.
This 2015 Wall Street Journal article that kickstarted scrutiny of Theranos has been described as a “bombshell.” It dispassionately recounts whistleblower complaints and inconsistencies in company claims, but the implications of potentially inaccurate medical tests are chilling. Carreyrou writes, “Some of the potassium results at Theranos were so high that patients would have to be dead for the results to be correct, according to one former employee.”
Real-estate agent Maureen Glunz went to Theranos a few days before last Thanksgiving after complaining of ringing in her ear. Her blood was drawn from a vein in her arm. The results showed abnormally elevated levels of glucose, calcium, total protein and three liver enzymes.
Her primary-care doctor, Nicole Sundene, who is a naturopath, worried that Ms. Glunz might be at risk of a stroke and asked her to go to an emergency room. The hospital’s tests two days later showed nothing abnormal…
Ms. Glunz says she likes Theranos’s low prices and would go there again if she could be sure its tests are accurate.
“But trial and error on people, that’s not OK,” she says.
A decade later, the saga continues. While Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes serves out her prison sentence for fraud, her partner’s company has been raising money for a new biotech startup that also involves medical testing.
How the Case Against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed (Brian Deer, British Medical Journal, January 2011)
Andrew Wakefield’s autism-related research has damaged public trust in science. Wakefield is a British medical researcher turned anti-vaccine activist. In the first part of a retrospective series of articles for the British Medical Journal, Brian Deer carefully tracks Wakefield’s fraudulent research on the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Wakefield altered or omitted data for an influential 1998 paper, which was commissioned for a planned lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. The lawyer had been paying Wakefield, who did not disclose this financial interest (which should be standard in research papers). Wakefield had his own business plans to start a biotechnology company that would test for the mysterious condition highlighted in his paper.
This was more than just shoddy science compromised by clear conflicts of interest. It was, in Deer’s words, “the foundation of the vaccine scare.”
The journal, meanwhile, took 12 years to retract the paper, by which time its mischief had been exported. As parents’ confidence slowly returned in Britain, the scare took off around the world, unleashing fear, guilt, and infectious diseases—and fuelling suspicion of vaccines in general. In addition to measles outbreaks, other infections are resurgent, with Mr. 11’s home state of California last summer seeing 10 babies dead from whooping cough, in the worst outbreak since 1958.
Wakefield, nevertheless, now apparently self-employed and professionally ruined, remains championed by a sad rump of disciples. “Dr. Wakefield is a hero,” is how one mother caught their mood in a recent Dateline NBC TV investigation, featuring the story of the doctor and me. “I don’t know where we would be without him.”
How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective (Ingfei Chen, The New Yorker, June 2021)
To end on a happier note: Cheating scientists have given rise to research-integrity sleuths, who analyze papers for potentially serious errors. The best-known of these is Elisabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist who works as a science consultant in California. In 2013, Bik found that some of her own work had been plagiarized in a book. The next year, she came across a curious image of a protein in a dissertation. It seemed that the same image appeared later in the same dissertation, but rotated, and in reference to a different experiment.
Soon she was combing through images in masses of research papers to spot others that showed signs of manipulation, which suggested that research results were being deliberately misrepresented. Remarkably, Bik does this work very speedily and manually, generally using just her eyes and her memory. As Ingfei Chen’s visit to Bik’s house suggests, Bik is highly methodical and detail oriented, even when it comes to home decor. Although no individual, no matter how eagle-eyed, can compete with the large scale of science fraud networks, stories like this help to make an abstract problem feel more tangible.
Some observers worry that the airing of dirty laundry risks undermining public faith in science. Bik believes that most research is trustworthy, and regards her work as a necessary part of science’s self-correcting mechanism; universities, she told me, may be loath to investigate faculty members who bring in grant money, and publishers may hesitate to retract bad articles, since every cited paper increases a journal’s citation ranking. (In recent years, some researchers have also sued journals over retractions.) She is appalled at how editors routinely accept weak excuses for image manipulation—it’s like “the dog ate my homework,” she said.
Christine Ro is a journalist in London. Because of her varied interests, a critic once wrote of her, “She must be a conglomerate.”
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/14/science-cheats-a-reading-list-on-unscrupulous-scientists/
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