This post was originally published on here
Science is having a good decade. We can create vaccines in weeks, build telescopes that peer back to the dawn of time and map a human genome for less than the cost of a family holiday. Something is plainly going right. But not everything in the lab is as it should be.
Over the past few years, a series of high-profile cases has shown error and fraud to be far more common than scientists would like to believe.
The most uncomfortable examples have come from the very top. In 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of Stanford University after an investigation found that research he had overseen contained manipulated images. He denied personal wrongdoing but the damage was done.
In the same year, the journal Nature retracted a paper claiming the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor, a result that briefly promised radically faster computers and levitating trains. Experts expressed scepticism from the outset, not least because the researcher involved had had papers withdrawn before. The miracle material did not transform technology. It merely deepened doubts about quality control at one of the world’s most prestigious journals.
The chutzpah can be striking. A celebrated Harvard professor whose career was built on studying honesty stands accused of fabricating data in several papers. One of the most cited papers on Alzheimer’s research has been shown to contain doctored test results.
These are not isolated slips. Retractions are rising at record pace. Journals routinely publish papers that later turn out to contain duplicated images, impossible statistics or results that cannot be reproduced.
Peer review, for all its virtues, was never designed to detect fraud. Reviewers are unpaid, overworked and generally assume good faith. They are asked to judge plausibility, not to audit raw data line by line.
Britain’s response has largely been to sigh, tighten guidelines and hope for the best. America has taken a different approach, and it is worth a look. Under America’s False Claims Act, individuals can sue on behalf of the US government when they feel that public money has been obtained fraudulently. This includes the use of falsified research to secure grants. Successful whistleblowers receive a share of the recovered funds.
The mechanism works. Sholto David, a British scientist living in Oxford, uncovered extensive image manipulation in papers produced by researchers at the prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, which had been used to obtain US government funding. The institute agreed to pay £12 million to settle the case. David’s reward will be about £2 million. The lawyer he worked with has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars using the same statute, and most of it has been returned to public funders to be spent on better research.
This isn’t vigilantism, nor an attack on science. It is an incentive system that discourages dishonesty and rewards scrutiny. Britain already has whistleblower protections but nothing comparable that allows citizens to act directly when funding has been obtained by deception.
Science will always involve mistakes. Fraud is different. If the UK wants to preserve public trust in research, and to fund it generously, it should consider borrowing an American idea.
