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A Snip from the History of Research Fraud

David H. sends this as an IM:

David: 1974, William Summerlin, reported that he could transplant tissue from genetically unrelated animals without rejection.

Summerlin demonstrated his claims by showing white mice that had black patches on their backs because their skin had been transplanted from unrelated black donor mice.

Summerlin used a black felt-tip marker.

he’s my all-time favorite research misconduct example

Me: he kept a straight face?

David: yes, at the sloan-kettering institute for cancer research and he made his demonstration to robert good

a technician took a look and ratted him out

Isaac Newton may have adjusted calculations to fit observations.

Gregor Mendel’s results with pea plants were cleaner than what is observed, experimentally, indicating that he might have changed the data.

Robert Millikan, in a research paper describing the charge of an electron, failed to mention that he eliminated some data points.

2 Comments

  1. Steve Burnett

    Amusing coincidence to see this the same day as this thread about bad sources on Making Light: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009280.html

  2. Sayan

    Just a couple of days I read this

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/14/scinewt114.xml

    of course, the Leibnitz – Newton row itself is probably a similar story.

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