Recent reports of scientific misconduct have fed impressions that fraud is increasing. In the UK, the demands of the Research Assessment Exercise and the intense competition for limited research funding are often blamed. Stephen Minger, Steve Fuller and Philip Campbell discuss.

Fraud is not on the rise

Science is still an honourable vocation, argues Stephen Minger

It is no wonder that, in today’s research environment in which  the drive to succeed and be the first to do so has reached unprecedented levels, people think there is increasing fraud in science.

This is so particularly in the aftermath of ‘Hwang-gate’, which exposed the seemingly-remarkable stem cell work of the South Korean scientist Professor Hwang as fraudulent.
However, from my perspective as a research scientist, I have no reason to believe that fraud in science is on the rise.

More caution, not less

I think that the motivation to cheat and to publish fraudulent data is as rare as in previous years.  Almost any one engaged in scientific research is passionate about their particular field, and certainly most of us are driven to excel in a competitive and pressurised environment. We are scientists foremost because it is our vocation rather than our profession.  But I think very few of us would ever consider risking a career that has taken years of hard effort and considerable personal struggle to achieve, all for that one ‘killer’ paper in Science or Nature.

In my own area of research, stem cell biology, the desire to translate our work from the laboratory into human clinical applications is often palpable and visceral.  But the prospect of contributing to the generation of new novel therapies that one day will provide substantial improvement in the quality of life for a large number of individuals with chronic and debilitating disease actually makes us much more cautious in interpreting the our results and publishing our work.

Peer review works

The peer review process is science does work. It is called reproducibility – another research team somewhere else in the world looks over our published work and replicates our research findings in their lab and with their researchers.  Data and research findings that cannot be replicated become the subject of gossip on the scientific grapevine, and one can easily gain a reputation for publishing dubious data.  But these are very rare research groups and certainly do not represent the mainstream of scientific research.

The problems that afflicted the research team in Seoul are a tragic lesson to everyone engaged in high-profile research, and one that we must all learn from.  But science is still an honourable vocation, where the process of peer review, scrupulous dissection of one another’s data, and the replication of experimental findings are still the sine qua non of the scientific method.  It is for this reason that fraud in science will never become widespread and where the vast majority of published work will hold up to such scrutiny.

Dr Stephen Minger is the Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at Kings College London