Science, like everything else, is not exempt from fraud, plagiarism and all kinds of cheating, as the Retraction Watch portal attests, which each year echoes between 500 and 600 retractions of articles published in prestigious scientific journals. The reasons that lead a publisher to withdraw one of its publications are diverse: use of unconfirmed or invented data, copies of other works, misuse of statistics …
Throughout the history of science there have been cases of very notorious fraud such as that of the Piltdown man, a supposed missing link in evolution, but scientific traps are the order of the day. The consequences of these deceptions go beyond the anecdote, since they create confusion and hinder the progress of it. For example, and going back to the Piltdown man: during the more than 40 years that the deception lasted, anthropologists found themselves at a dead end and important finds such as the australopithecine fossils of the Taung child, inconsistent with the line of study that opened the supposed British fossils.
In addition, scams in the field of medicine can be extremely dangerous, since in many cases the results of fraudulent work have been used to develop clinical protocols and treatments for many diseases. They can also lay the basis for movements or beliefs that pose a danger to public health: this is the case of anti-vaccine movements, which are based, among other arguments, on a false work that linked autism with the administration of the MMR vaccine .
Scientific fraud is also a waste of research funds. Many great hoaxes have to do with such hot and sweet topics as cloning, stem cell research or the search for vaccines and treatments against diseases such as AIDS. Its authors receive large grants to maintain their lines of research , and in fact there are many great scammers of science convicted of embezzlement.
