Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5637

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Ingram J.
Giving in to the urge to cheat : Some scientists just can't seem to resist
Toronto Star 2006 Jul 22
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1153518609670

Full text:

Giving in to the urge to cheat
Some scientists just can’t seem to resist
Jul. 22, 2006. 01:00 AM
JAY INGRAM

The essence of science is experimentation, right? You can have all sorts of good ideas, but until you confirm or disprove them by testing them, they’re just ideas. But throw the idea of faked experiments into the mix and you have the possibility for something really weird: a scientific idea that should be thrown out because the experiments supporting it have been faked, but an idea that turns out to be right anyway.

This is the case with a Norwegian cancer researcher, Jon Sudbo, who is – or was – a renowned expert on oral cancer.

It’s now clear that Sudbo was even better at faking his results. For one paper on the use of anti-inflammatory drugs to treat oral cancer, he sat down and invented data for something like 900 patients. The amazing thing is that he apparently created these people, their names, weight, age and so on, from thin air and then persuaded his co-authors on the scientific paper that they were real. And why would they doubt him?

But the story is even more curious. In other work, Sudbo had excited scientists by claiming that he could identify people who were at high risk for oral cancer. This is a difficult cancer to treat, and survival is highly dependent on early diagnosis.

Sudbo argued that the presence of cells in the mouth containing abnormal numbers of chromosomes was a warning sign, and that people who had mouth sores with these unusual cells were not only more likely to get oral cancer, they were probably going to come down with an unusually aggressive form of the disease.

Sudbo presented data supporting his claim in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine a few years ago, and other cancer specialists had taken up his suggestion and found that they were indeed having better success identifying those high-risk patients. One researcher testifies that the Sudbo method is twice as good as one of the standard techniques.

Several different labs around the world, including one in British Columbia, are now going back to square one to test the idea once again. Most suspect that Sudbo might have been on to something, but probably exaggerated its efficacy.

Any case of scientific fraud is peculiar because the scientist who commits it is usually smart enough to be successful doing straight-ahead, honest work.

But cases like Sudbo’s are even odder because, fraud or not, he may be right (making it even stranger that he would cheat).

One of the most celebrated such cases involved a young scientist named Mark Spector in the early 1980s.

Spector came to the lab of a celebrated biochemist at Cornell University, Efraim Racker, and proceeded to dazzle Racker and just about everyone with his brilliant mind and fantastic ability to make difficult and technical experiments work.

Spector’s ideas and his golden hands led to a spectacular theory of the cause of cancer. Spector envisioned a series of chemical steps in cells, triggered by cancer-causing viruses, but more important he was able to identify and isolate many of the chemicals involved. It was called the “kinase cascade.”

The stunning thing was that other capable scientists were unable to make the same experiments work.

For some time, most accepted that Spector was a unique experimentalist, able to do things that most other mortal scientists couldn’t. But when it became clear that most of these experiments only worked when Spector had his hands on them, the whole story began to fall apart.

Eventually, one of Spector’s collaborators made sure that he secured the original materials from one experiment (materials that Spector usually kept to himself) and found they weren’t the chemicals Spector had claimed they were. Everything unravelled, the scientific papers were retracted, and Spector’s scientific career was over.

However, Spector’s ideas had been as entrancing as his experimental results. One scientist argued that if Spector had simply offered his complex of cancer-causing chemistry as “just a hypothesis, he would have been recognized as a genius.”

Strange that some scientists commit fraud, but much stranger still that some, who clearly are on the right track with their ideas (if not far ahead of the pack), apparently can’t stand waiting for nature to back them up, but yield to the temptation to give nature a little help.

Do you think there were/are some out there who got away with the fraud, and will never be discovered because they were right all along?

Jay Ingram hosts Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel.