We often think of fraud as being the exclusive domain of the financial world - one only has to look at the number of finance companies that have gone bust recently - but it is not unique to this. For instance, recall the fake CVs of Mary-Anne Thompson, the former head of the New Zealand Immigration Service, and John Davy, the first head of Maori Television.
We scientists would like to think that science is immune from such human foibles. But because science is carried out by humans, the temptation for fraud will always be there, and some will succumb. This is the story of one who did.
Despite what academics would have you believe, it's their PhD students who do all the research work at a university (at least in chemistry departments, anyway). This has implications for both the PhD students and their academic supervisors - the former want to obtain a good PhD degree with lots of publications, so that they can get a good job at the end of it, and the latter rely on those publications to further their careers.
Indeed, new academics, who are usually hired for a five-year "tenure-track" trial period, are absolutely dependent on the work of their PhD students in order to be awarded tenure (or in other words, a job for life).
In 2006, seven papers were retracted from what is arguably the best chemistry journal on the planet, the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The lead author on these papers was Dalibor Sames, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University in New York, a very prestigious institution. The only other common author on all the papers was Bengc Sezen, his PhD student.
It is rare in chemistry that a paper is retracted, and it usually means that the work described therein has been found to be irreproducible for some reason. Therefore, for seven papers to be retracted by the same author is nothing less than a scandal, and as a result, both Columbia University and the Office of Research Integrity undertook an investigation, the results of which have only just been released.
It turns out that Bengc Sezen made up the results in her PhD. She was working in a field of enormous importance in chemistry, and the potential rewards for success in this field were substantial. Her results were indeed spectacular, and this was the reason that her work was published in the very best journal.
However, once published, other workers in the field had problems reproducing her work, and reported this to Prof Sames, who had only just been awarded tenure at least partly on the basis of some of those results. Sezen was also the only person in Sames' laboratory who could get the reactions to work, and Sames sacked more than one PhD student because they couldn't repeat the reactions.
Sezen was eventually found out by one of her lab-mates, who ran a "sting" operation. It transpires that Sezen had been coming back to the lab in the middle of the night and spiking reaction mixtures with the desired product that would result from a given starting material. Her lab-mate simply misinformed her as to the nature of the starting material in one of his reaction mixtures, and came back the next day to find it contained the wrong product.
However, by the time Sames got around to retracting the papers, Sezen had left the laboratory to start another PhD in Heidelberg. Interestingly, her whereabouts today is unknown, although she is listed as a faculty member at a university in Istanbul.
This case will keep the scientific ethicists busy for years. Sezen was found guilty (in absentia) of 21 counts of scientific misconduct, Columbia have finally retracted her PhD degree, and she won't be eligible for federal funding for a grand total of five years(!).
However, Sames appears to have suffered no punishment and still has a laboratory full of students. Questions have to be asked about his responsibility to check the results of his students.
His retractions read "... the corresponding author withdraws this paper, and deeply regrets that the chemical community was misled by its publication".
When one considers the ruined careers of the sacked PhD students, and the time wasted attempting to reproduce the fraudulent results, one wonders if simple regret is enough.
• Dr Blackman is an associate professor in the chemistry department at the University of Otago.
