False Prophets — Fraud and Error in Science and Medicine

Description

Did Newton fudge his figures? Who counted Mendel's peas? And what lay behind Cyril Burt's disturbing statistics on race and intelligence? From Piltdown Man to the Lysenko case and the Hitler diaries, «False Prophets» chronicles some famous frauds and unearths several lesser-known incidents buried in the scientific literature. Choosing examples from the realms of science and medicine, as well as history, archaeology, and psychology, Alexander Kohn explores the deceivers' motives and discusses the pressures and conditions that make fraud possible. For this revised edition, Kohn has updated some of the case studies in the light of new evidence and has included a discussion of the controversy among scientists over the provenance of AIDS. In a final chapter he asks whether fraud is endemic to science, whether there can ever be a remedy for the larce incidence of error that creeps into the published results of scientific research, and what happens to those who attempt to blow the whistle on their colleagues. Alexander Kohn was Professor of Virology at the Tel Aviv Medical School and editor of «The Journal of Irreproducible Results». Despite the centrality of honesty in the scientific enterprise, it is foolish to assume that dishonesty, common in most fields of human activity, should be rare in science. Falsification is inevitable in human society, be it scientific or otherwise. Science, like banking, however, has the ways and means to keep misconduct in check.