20 Cases of Scientific Fraud That Set Research Back by Several Years

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian, presented skull fragments from Sussex, England, as evidence of the existence of a prehistoric human ancestor. The fossil turned out to be a hoax, fabricated from a human skull and an orangutan jawbone, and it plunged paleoanthropology into a dead end for decades, fueling debates based on evidence that should never have been considered.

Johann Beringer was a physician and naturalist from Würzburg, Germany, who, in the 1720s, was duped by “fossils” carved from limestone and placed there to deceive him. He published a book defending them, and this episode became one of the first public lessons demonstrating how ego, rivalry, and wishful thinking can derail the course of natural history.

William Summerlin was a transplant researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York who claimed to have solved a major problem with transplant rejection in the 1970s. Then, his colleagues discovered that he had used markers to blacken white mice to simulate successful skin transplants, which deeply embarrassed the transplant research community.

John Darsee appeared to be a rising star in cardiology at institutions such as Emory, Harvard, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and this reputation earned him a great deal of trust. When falsified data began to surface in the early 1980s, the scandal shook the world of biomedical research and revealed just how easily prestige could mask work that was not genuine.

Malcolm Pearce was a London-based obstetrician who published a sensational article in 1994 claiming that an ectopic pregnancy had been removed and then reimplanted into the uterus, resulting in a live birth. This case was later revealed to be a fraud, exposing the field of reproductive medicine to a major editorial failure.

Andrew Wakefield was a British gastroenterologist whose 1998 paper linked the MMR vaccine to autism, triggering a wave of panic far beyond academic medical circles. The study was later exposed as fraudulent and retracted, but by that time, vaccination rates had already plummeted, and public health officials found themselves in a bind, struggling to contain a fear that should never have taken hold.

Jan Hendrik Schön was a physicist at Bell Labs in New Jersey who seemed to be making one major breakthrough after another in the fields of molecular electronics and condensed matter physics. When investigators discovered falsified and reused data in several papers, nanotechnology researchers had to assess the time and energy they had devoted to pursuing results that had never been valid.

Hwang Woo-suk was a South Korean researcher who gained nationwide fame after claiming to have created patient-specific human embryonic stem cells through cloning in 2004 and 2005. When these publications were revealed to be fraudulent, stem cell research suffered a massive blow to its credibility.

Eric Poehlman was a prominent researcher at the University of Vermont who specialized in the study of obesity, metabolism, menopause, and aging. He falsified data in scientific articles and grant applications—including information about participants—and the repercussions of his actions extended beyond scientific journals to influence federal funding decisions in a public health field where the stakes are already high.

Diederik Stapel was a Dutch social psychologist whose studies on stereotypes, behavior, and social cues were well-crafted, rigorous, and easy to turn into headlines. When his fabricated datasets were exposed in 2011, social psychology was faced with an even more serious problem: a research culture that had become a little too accustomed to the implausible.

Marc Hauser was a Harvard psychologist and biologist whose work on monkeys, language, and morality sparked important debates about the evolution of the human mind. Findings of research misconduct subsequently cast doubt on certain aspects of this research, and the scandal led to the reevaluation of theories that had already spread far beyond the confines of a single laboratory or subdiscipline.

Yoshitaka Fujii was a Japanese anesthesiologist whose publications eventually came to be viewed with increasing suspicion. Investigations revealed large-scale data fabrication, and anesthesiology researchers had to spend years removing the erroneous data from the scientific literature in fields related to pain management, the treatment of nausea, and perioperative care.

Haruko Obokata was a young researcher at RIKEN in Japan who gained notoriety in 2014 by claiming that ordinary cells could be reverted to a state similar to that of stem cells through stress. Her papers were discredited following findings of scientific misconduct and failed attempts to replicate her results, and the field of stem cell biology suffered another public setback after a wave of overwhelming enthusiasm.

Anil Potti was an oncologist at Duke whose research suggested that gene expression signatures could help determine the most appropriate chemotherapy treatment for each cancer patient. This idea was on the verge of being put into clinical practice when the research was halted, and subsequent findings of research misconduct left the field of precision oncology facing halted clinical trials, shaken confidence, and patients who had come all too close to experiencing a scientific failure.

Dong-Pyou Han was a biomedical researcher in Iowa working on an HIV vaccine project that received significant federal funding. He added human antibodies to rabbit blood samples in an effort to make the vaccine appear more promising, thereby wasting money and time in a field where both resources are particularly scarce.

Jon Sudbø was a Norwegian physician and cancer researcher whose work suggested that anti-inflammatory drugs might reduce the risk of oral cancer. This claim quickly caused a stir, only to collapse when it emerged that the dataset included patients who did not exist, forcing the oncology community to dismantle an entire branch of preventive research based on fiction.

Scott Reuben was an anesthesiologist from Massachusetts whose articles on postoperative pain management helped shape thinking about certain drug combinations following surgery. When it became apparent that many of these studies had been fabricated, clinicians were forced to reevaluate years of assumptions in a field that directly impacts the day-to-day care of patients.

Joachim Boldt was a leading figure in anesthesiology and critical care in Germany, particularly in the field of intravenous solutions used in surgery and critical care. As the retractions mounted, it became clear that fraudulent clinical research had infiltrated the literature on which doctors and guideline authors were actually relying, making the repercussions all the more urgent.

Paolo Macchiarini was a thoracic surgeon who touted synthetic trachea transplants as a major breakthrough in regenerative medicine, particularly during his time in Sweden. Subsequent investigations revealed serious ethical violations in connection with this research, and the case caused a major uproar because real patients had already suffered harm while the research was still being touted as the future.

Rusi Taleyarkhan, a nuclear engineer at Purdue University, had presented evidence in the early 2000s in support of sonofusion, or bubble fusion, an idea that had raised a great deal of hope. The findings of scientific misconduct then focused on how this so-called independent verification had been presented, plunging an already controversial field of physics into even deeper doubt.