iStockphoto <\/p>\n
1 What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had. <\/p>\n
2 After studying retracted biology papers published between 2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations. <\/p>\n
3 But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed Steens data, they found that Americans arent so shifty after all. <\/p>\n
advertisement | article continues below <\/p>\n
4Chinese scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud. (French researchers were least likely to misbehave.) <\/p>\n
5If caught stealing someone elses ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought. <\/p>\n
6 But theres no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the FDA investigated Francois Savery, a doctor who submitted identical data to two drug companies, claiming that they were from two different studies. When confronted, he explained that he was forced to re-create his data sets because he took the original research with him on a lake picnic and lost it when his rowboat capsized. <\/p>\n
7 Government authorities later learned that Savery never conducted the studies in the first placeor received a medical degree. <\/p>\n
8Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
View post: iStockphoto 1 What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. Continue reading
\n20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science Fraud | DISCOVER<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"