Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science

by Richard Dawkins

A few scientists cheat, changing numbers or inventing experiments that never happened, in the service of a cherished hypothesis. What is significant about these cases is not their existence but the unmitigated horror with which they are regarded by the scientific community. If a gardener asks us to pay him in used fivers, we wink knowingly and don’t tell the tax man. If a friend Joads the railway,fn2 travelling without a ticket, we are less indulgent but still don’t expose him. But a scientist proved to have fabricated a data point would be banished unlamented from his profession without a second chance. Admittedly, precisely because scientific cheating is such a heinous disgrace, professors tend to close ranks about a colleague so accused, and put would-be whistle-blowers through distressing hoops to substantiate their case. But all scientists at least pay lip service to the view that a proven cheat must not practise as a scientist ever again and must presumably retrain in the law or some other profession more suited to his talents.