That people, from politicians to priests, cheat and lie is taken for granted by many. But scientists, surely, are above that sort of thing? In the past decade the cases of Hwang Woo-Suk, who falsely reported making human embryonic stem cells by cloning, and Jan Schon, a physicist who claimed astonishing (and fabricated) results in the fields of semiconductors and superconductors, have shown that they certainly are not. However, on these occasions the claims made were so spectacular that they were bound to attract close scrutiny, and thus be exposed eventually. In the cases of Dr Hwang and ex-Dr Schon, the real question for science was not whether it harbours a few megalomaniac fantasists, but why the frauds were not exposed earlier when the papers that made the claims were being reviewed by peers.
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