In science, it is not customary to take a word. Otherwise, there would be "leaders" of quantum mechanics and "spiritual leaders" of the theory of evolution. The guardian of order in science is the so-called scientific method . Its meaning is that no one can implant truths of last resort at will so that one can always check any discoveries, experiments, laws, etc.

Sometimes science gets a stab in the back. Some scientists become fraudsters and fake the results of their research. There are a lot of motives: someone dreams of a quick career, someone - about easy money, and someone is afraid to admit that he was wrong. But sooner or later deceivers catches up with the scientific method. Our friends, the project Sci-One, which is being filmed in our office, prepared a material about the six most audacious scientific scams. Watch the video and read the text version under the cut.

Attack of the Clones

In 2005, the world was shocked by the news - it was possible to clone human cells and use them for treatment. The unique technique allowed to put on his feet, for example, paralyzed patients. Behind the long-awaited breakthrough in medicine was the pioneer of cloning, Usok Hwang from Seoul National University. It was a world triumph. The Nobel Prize was on the horizon.
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But among the high-profile articles and reports, strange accusations appeared, which were brought to the attention of his fellow scientists. After this, Hwan's teammates “broke down” first and began to accuse each other of fraud. Then rivals from competing research groups "ran down" and dug up the weak points in the scientist's works. Usok Hwan tried to explain where the discrepancies in the data and mounting on the photographs, but did not help. As a result, he had to admit to fraud.

After that, South Korea recovered for a long time. It was a worldwide national disgrace.

Starship for nasa

In 1996, NASA launched a revolutionary project , the name of which can be translated as " Breakthrough program of physics of jet motion ." The project was supposed to create fundamentally new engines for the future spacecraft. Everything was like in Star Wars or Star Trek.

The leading NASA expert, Mark Millis, dealt with the problem of generating an anti-gravity field (!), Which was supposed to create a block of matter with negative mass. Offered and generators, locally changing the magnitude of the gravitational constant. After six years of research and a half million dollars in NASA suspected that something was wrong. The known laws of physics still could not be broken. The project was closed, and Millis left NASA only in 2010.

In fact, the Agency was not fools, handing out budgets for deliberately meaningless ventures. Just the dead end calculations of Millis helped not to be distracted by false directions in real research. But the physicist himself too much believed in his work and created a non - profit organization that continues to struggle with the laws of physics for the sake of interstellar flights.

Fantastic loner

In 2012, dozens of medical schools and reputable scientific journals around the world became interested in Yoshitaki Fujii research.

The scientist was enviably fertile - for 19 years he has published 249 scientific papers on combating the effects of anesthesia. That is, on average, one job per month. When they began to check, it turned out that half of the publications have the same attitude to science as novels or stories.

The professor, who was allocated quite good funds for research, has been writing for 19 years in a row. In some cases, he still studied something, but from the heart attributed. Magazines officially recalled 172 of its publication. And this is an absolute record to date. Fujii expelled from all posts without the right to return.

Fool me if you can

In 2007, in one prestigious international scientific journal devoted to mathematics and computer calculations, an entertaining article appeared with such a difficult to translate title: “REMOVED: Cooperative, compact algorithms for randomized algorithms” . The experts of the publication approved it.

Then the story repeated itself in Russia . Domestic reviewer praised this work. Probably, if programs had ambition, then SCIgen would have it off scale. It turned out that the article was written by this particular computer program. And the program itself was developed by savvy MIT students. Further investigation revealed that the algorithm incorporated in the program was the author of more than a hundred scientific articles. He took scientific terms, pieces of other people's texts, illustrations, references, mixed and more or less adequately designed. For about five years, abstruse articles generated by the machine appeared at various conferences, and serious experts referred to them. Until scientific publishers finally realized it.

Try to fool again

After such a scandal, the review system was supposed to restore order. In 2013, journalist John Bohannon decided to check how publishers coped. He wrote the biomedical analogue of the SCIgen program and with his help generated 300 articles.

Bohannon sent them to scientific publications around the world. More than half accepted them for publication. After the publication of the details of the history of the "machine" articles for a long time caught and withdrawn one by one.

Cheating or mistake?

And the most controversial history in genetics since the beginning of the XXI century. In 2014, a sensation spread over the planet - Japanese researchers obtained stem cells from ordinary cells , and without very complicated manipulations. The cells were simply placed in an acidic medium, created a physical pressure or heated.

This meant a revolution in world medicine. The uniqueness of stem cells is that they can turn into any other. Want a new liver? You are welcome. Lungs? No problem. Brain? No problem. And for the cultivation of all this, you can take, say, a piece of skin.

It sounds too fabulous to be true. Therefore, the leadership of the RIKEN Institute, where the authors of the discovery worked, suggested that they repeat the experiments in the laboratory under round-the-clock video surveillance. Scientists 48 times tried to create cells according to the method described in their article, but without a hint of success. Until now, it is impossible to say for sure: the authors of the study were simply mistaken or in fact fabricated the discovery.

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Science has so far managed to cope with deception and fraud. Over the centuries, rigorous principles of scientific knowledge have been developed, when researchers go from theoretical to practical tests, and then test any statements for durability many times over. And if they find something that does not fit into the previous explanations, they create new theories. So we left alchemy, and now science saves millions of lives and opens up new real, not fictional worlds.