When even Really Smart People Get Fooled
The typical response to fraud victims is combination of pity and contempt. How could you not know that it was too good to be true?
But even sophisticated scientists get caught in frauds, scientific fake discoveries published in prestigious journals.
As reported by the New York Times, "Fraudulent stem cell reports that shook the scientific world could have been prevented by extra review procedures, according to a panel appointed by Science, the journal that published the claims, in Journal Faulted in Publishing Korean's Claims."
The fraud was only discovered when a whistle blower in Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's laboratory fessed up to a television station.
There were no replacement tissues to be grown from an individual's own cells; the entire thing had been a fabrication.
How did the Science Journal react? Well, "Science has long taken the position that its reviewing procedures work well but cannot be expected to detect deliberate fraud, and therefore no change is necessary."
Doesn't this strike you as absurd? Fraud works well when most people are insisting that it could not happen.
