An Unwelcome Discovery - NYT

Fraud in science is not a new thing. It is worthwhile to record them nonetheless, because each incident serves to:

• maintain a tally as a counterbalance against exclusive claims to character
• the limits of the context of justification idea: in this case, papers (including, I assume, those published in peer reviewed journals) dating back to decade(s) ago had to be withdrawn
• the waste of public moneys and the level of oversight that in reality can be maintained
• the risks posed to the public by all of the above

Below is a segment of a New York Times report:

An Unwelcome Discovery - New York Times

On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a federal judge in the United States District Court in downtown Burlington, Vt. His sentencing hearing had dragged on for more than four hours, and Poehlman, dressed in a black suit, remained silent while the lawyers argued over the appropriate sentence for his transgressions. Now was his chance to speak. A year earlier, in the same courthouse, Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers. By the time Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.

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