Fraude em Ciência

É mais comum do que se pensa. A diferença entre a ciência e outras áreas, todavia, é que as fraudes e fraudadores são cedo ou tarde desmascarados. Considerem a incrível história do picareta Jan Hendrik Schön: "Between 2000 and 2002, Jan Hendrik Schön, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, published more than 20 articles on electrical properties of unusual materials. He shot to the very top of the booming field of “molecular electronics”—a wonder field in which researchers aim to shrink computer chips down to single-molecule components. At Schön’s peak, he was submitting 4 or 5 articles per month, most of them going to top journals like Science and Nature. He hit his record in autumn 2001, turning out 7 articles that November alone. The output was staggering. It’s rare for a scientist—even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor to data—to submit 7 articles in an entire year, let alone one month. And Schön’s papers were no run-of-the-mill exercises. In them, he announced one unbelievable discovery after another: He had created organic plastics that became superconductors or lasers; he had fashioned nanoscale transistors; and more. The editors of Science hailed one of his many contributions as a “breakthrough of the year” in 2001. The CEO of Lucent Technologies (parent company of Bell Labs) likewise touted Schön’s work when courting investors. Everything Schön touched seemed to turn to research gold.
Alas, it was fool’s gold. Following a formal investigation in 2002, Bell Labs dismissed Schön. The investigating committee, chaired by Stanford professor Malcolm Beasley, considered serious allegations against 24 papers by Schön and his coauthors, including 8 published in Science and 5 in Nature. The committee concluded that at least 16 of the papers showed clear evidence of scientific misconduct. Another 6 struck the committee as “troubling,” even if they were not indisputably the result of intentional fraud.
According to the Beasley committee, Schön’s misconduct fell into three basic categories: “substitution of data,” “unrealistic precision of data” and “results that contradict known physics.” The “substitution” charge was that Schön recycled graphs representing data from one type of material, changed axes or labels, and passed them off as coming from different materials. The second two charges involved either heavy-handed manipulation of data—such as replacing raw data with averaged, filtered or smoothed curves—or the fabrication of entire data sets out of thin air. Some graphs in the suspect articles, for example, appeared to have been generated by matching a known equation, with no experimental input whatsoever".