I don't know which philosopher said this sentence, which is quite sensational. However, objectively speaking, there are too many deceptive tricks in this world, and once these tricks are touched by science, it is even more difficult to distinguish between true and false and elusive. However, a scam is a scam after all, just like Lincoln's famous saying: "You can fool everyone for a while, or you can fool some people forever, but you can't fool everyone forever." After reading the book Illusion-20 scientific scams that shocked the world by Shanghai Culture Publishing House, I believe everyone will have more feelings about Lincoln's words.
Reading this book is a bit like reading a detective novel. The deepest feeling is shock, shock again and again! Although some events have long been heard, they have never been so detailed and thorough. What is even more rare is that there are two or three hundred illustrations in the book. The image of the maker of the shocking big scam is vivid, and you can even see the "criminal evidence", which is naturally more interesting to read.
Now, according to my own degree of "shock", I summarize the top 20 scientific scandals as follows. Of course, I suggest you take a book to read. It's quite interesting. I bought it in Joyo. Com, only 2 1 yuan.
1. Bulten ancient fossils-the great scam of the century.
The hoax of this century is one of the most famous scientific scandals in history. 19 1 1 year, British lawyer Dawson claimed to have found part of the skull of an ape-man in Bulten. 19 13, Dawson and Woodward, a famous British anthropologist, announced that they had unearthed the skull of a half-ape-half-human creature, and claimed that this creature lived about 500,000 years ago. Their "discovery" is regarded as strong evidence of Darwin's biological evolution theory, named "Shu Ren" in anthropology, considered as a transitional organism from apes to humans, and even appeared on stamps as a major scientific achievement. 1928, scientists determined the age of ancient fossils by fluorine content, and found that Shu Ren's skull was not earlier than Neolithic age, and his mandible belonged to a juvenile chimpanzee. They also found that the skull and mandible were stained. An elaborate scam was finally exposed.
2.n-ray-collective self-deception
1899, following the discovery of X-ray by the British scientist Roentgen, 1903, the famous French physicist Brownlow announced that he had discovered a new kind of ray-N-ray. It has aroused enthusiastic pursuit in French physics circles, and many scholars, including Nobel Prize winner becquerel, have followed suit. 1904 in the first half of the year, only the Journal of French Academy of Sciences published 54 papers on N-rays. But outside France, no one can find this kind of radiation. Later, British physicist Wood proved that N-rays were completely wrong. Brownlow, eager to make great achievements and compete with the British, took his subjective judgment as an objective fact. Other French scientists rallied around Brownlow out of national pride, thus creating this farce of collective self-deception.
3. Millikan chose the data when he did the experiment-the flaw on the great man.
19 10, American physicist Millikan conducted the famous "oil drop experiment", which was the first time that hydrogen was heavier than an electron 1836 times. 1923 won the nobel prize in physics. At the same time, Ellen Gaft, a physicist who is more famous than him, is doing the same experiment, but no corresponding results have been obtained. Sixty years later, historians found that the 58 observations published by Millikan were not "not selected" as he vowed, but were selected from 140 observations! He only collects beautiful data that is beneficial to him and deletes all unfavorable data. This discovery shocked the physics community.
4. Cold nuclear fusion-eager to be a laughing stock
1On March 23rd, 989, Burns of the University of Utah and Fresman of the University of Southampton held a press conference.
Yes, it is in a small device in the laboratory that heavy water is electrolyzed with palladium as cathode, realizing "cold nuclear fusion" at normal temperature and pressure. However, more than 0/000 laboratories around the world have never successfully repeated the experimental results of Burns and Fresman, and finally denied this achievement. Their stories have become a negative textbook known to almost everyone in the scientific community.
5. Schon's "science" series of fake papers-the fall of tomorrow's star.
The "Schon Incident" is considered as one of the biggest academic fraud scandals in the history of contemporary science. On June 5438+065438+1 October1day, 2002, American Science magazine published a brief statement by American physicist Schon and his eight collaborators, announcing the cancellation of eight papers published in Science magazine from 2000 to 2006. The first authors of these eight papers are all Schon, covering the achievements of organic transistors, superconducting devices and molecular semiconductors. At that time, 32-year-old Schon published nearly 90 papers in academic journals and was once considered as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. However, Schon's research results were questioned by some colleagues, so Bell Laboratories invited five external experts to investigate. According to the investigation conducted by experts in September, Schon fabricated or tampered with the experimental data in at least 16 papers, and his collaborators were innocent and had no knowledge of it. The reason for Schon's large-scale fraud is that he has a strong desire for fame and fortune, hoping to gain honor by publishing some conjectures first, and eventually his reputation is ruined.
6. Turning water into oil-a modern fantasy
In 1980s, Wang Hongcheng, a native of Harbin, China, declared that "water has turned into oil". His theory is to prepare a mother liquor, and then mix it with ordinary water at the ratio of 1: 100000 to become a "water-based fuel", which can replace gasoline with low cost. Only a simple machine can produce 1 ton mother liquor every 20 minutes, while 1 ton mother liquor can produce 65438 water-based fuel. Through his performance, Wang Hongcheng persuaded some famous scientists, and the president and party secretary of Harbin Institute of Technology also believed him. Some media called it "the fifth great invention of China", which made changing water into oil a hot news at that time. Before 1994, a number of CPPCC members jointly questioned, and this scam lasted for more than ten years in China, causing losses of hundreds of millions of yuan to the country. Wang Hongcheng was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison.
7. Liaoning ancient birds-hometown of shame fossils
"Liaoning ancient pirate bird" is a false fossil composed of different animal bones. After it was smuggled to the United States from 65438 to 0999, it attracted great attention of American scholars. The famous American National Geographic magazine published an article saying that ancient pirate birds were the missing link between dinosaurs and birds, which provided a direct basis for the dinosaur origin theory of birds. Later, Xu Xing, a scientist in China, exposed the scam. This scientific scandal immediately caused an uproar in western countries, including world-renowned media such as NBC, USA-Today, Nature and Science.
8. lysenko Incident-Power Distorted Science.
From 1930s to 1960s, Lamarck and michurin's concept of acquired genetics became orthodox in the Soviet Union. For political and other reasons, lysenko, the representative of Lamarckian School, refused to accept the genetics of Mendel and Morgan supported by experiments, and called western geneticists enemies of the Soviet people, persecuting their opponents with political tools, which caused havoc in Soviet genetics and spread to many Eastern Group countries including China. Lysenko incident is a typical case in which political authority replaces scientific authority to adjudicate scientific disputes.
9. Watergate Incident in American Science.
In the early 1970s, William summerlin, a scientist at the Si Long-Catalim Institute, claimed that he had successfully transplanted the skin of a black mouse into a white mouse. Summerlin seems to have found a way to avoid rejection without immunosuppressive drugs. This discovery is of great significance to organ transplantation. 1974, summerlin fraud case was exposed. It turned out that he achieved this result with the help of a black felt pen. An observant assistant in the laboratory noticed that the black spots on the mouse's back could be washed away, so everything else was washed away. Later, summerlin admitted everything and defended himself with heavy work. Finally, he was found guilty of misconduct. The summerlin incident caused a strong shock in academic circles, and many newspapers called this scandal "Watergate Incident in American Science".
10. Baltimore Incident-The Storm of Nobel Prize Winners
1In April, 986, Baltimore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Biomedicine, and her collaborator Teresa Carrie jointly published a paper in the famous academic journal Cell. However, a postdoctoral fellow with Teresa found that the experimental data obtained by her laboratory was flawed, which probably caused widespread concern. Sadly, in the five-year investigation, Baltimore has been using its reputation to publicly threaten investigators and oppose outside intervention. 1991March, after two rounds of investigation, the National Institutes of Health formally accused two key experimental data in the paper of being forged, which was a serious scientific misconduct. Although it was later confirmed that Baltimore was unaware of the data error and recovered his reputation, he withdrew his paper, publicly apologized to Otto, the whistleblower, and resigned as president of Rockefeller University.
1 1. The Dalcy incident at Harvard Medical School-paper can't cover fire.
Dalcy is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School. During his two years at Harvard, he published nearly 100 papers and was regarded as an outstanding talent. But later, colleagues in the lab exposed his fraud. However, his mentor, broward, thought it was just an isolated incident and concealed it. Although Dalcy was dismissed from his post at Harvard, he was still allowed to stay in the laboratory and continue his work. Later, it was discovered that almost all Dalcy's papers were false. Because of Harvard's popularity, this case is widely known in American academic circles.
12. Yale medical college incident-the biggest event in biomedical history.
1one morning in March, 979, the dean of Yale Medical College received a letter from Helena, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, accusing Felix, a professor at Yale University, and his student Soman of plagiarizing her paper. It turned out that Felix was the reviewer of Helena's contribution to the New England Journal of Medicine. Felix suggested that the magazine reject this article. Soman took the opportunity to plagiarize her paper and co-wrote an article with Fei Lige, which was submitted to the American Medical Journal. However, the paper was sent to Helena's tutor for review, and he gave it to Helena, so the paper was made public. Soman admitted plagiarism, but was sheltered by his tutor and Yale University. However, the subsequent investigation found that his article still had serious data tampering problems. This time lasted for more than a year and was the most shocking event in the history of biomedicine.
13. sokol incident-a sharp arrow shot at the mask of academic justice
From 65438 to 0996, Allen Soker, a professor of theoretical physics at new york University in the United States, wrote a paper "Beyond the Boundary: Towards the Superformal Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravitation" for the Social Text, a major post-modern ideological research center. It is said that this is an academic article discussing "postmodern philosophy and the political implications of physics in the 20th century". The language used in this paper is completely up to standard, and the form is quite satisfactory: the 35-page paper lists 265,438+07 references, all of which are accurate, and 65,438+009 annotations are clear. The five deputy editors of Social Texts agreed that this paper has reached a considerable level and was published in a special issue called War of Science. Unexpectedly, physicist Sokol published "Exposure-A physicist's cultural research experiment" in the monthly magazine Popular Language three weeks later, completely denying this article and admitting that he intends to imitate postmodern jargon. This paper looks good, but it is meaningless and full of mistakes. The article reveals that his "cheating articles" are nothing more than "a hodgepodge of deliberately fabricated fallacies, language abuse and various unfounded conclusions". He consciously fabricated a "connection" between postmodernism and contemporary science that editors believed deeply, and even added common-sense scientific mistakes. Sok believes that "deception" is accepted because it "sounds interesting" and "caters to the ideological bias of social text editors".
14. Berkeley Lab's "1 18 Element" event-a non-existent "major scientific and technological breakthrough".
1In June, 1999, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the United States published a paper in the famous academic journal Physical Review Express, saying that through the collision between lead nuclei and krypton nuclei, the missing element 1 18 in the periodic table and the element 65438 produced by the decay of element 1 18 were found. This achievement was once regarded as one of the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs of 1999.
However, other scientists' subsequent repeated studies could not achieve similar results. After reanalyzing the original data, the research team also found that an important index in the experiment was artificially made. In 2002, Berkeley Lab recently publicly admitted that the researchers had engaged in "unfair scientific behavior" and those who were most suspected were fired.
15. The storm of AIDS discovery right-eight years of struggle
1983, Professor Montnier of the Pasteur Institute in France extracted a virus (HIV) from a homosexual patient with lymphadenopathy, and published the research results in the American journal Science. 1984 In May, Science magazine published an article by Gallo, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute of the United States, saying that Gallo and others isolated a large number of viruses from 48 AIDS patients for the first time, and stressed that they were discovered independently. Montnier immediately issued a statement saying that Gallo sent a blood sample of HIV research to Gallo and accused Gallo of plagiarizing his research results. At 1987, through the bilateral mediation of then US President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, an agreement was reached that the two countries should give priority to finding human AIDS virus. The Chicago Tribune conducted a three-year investigation, which confirmed that Gallo's paper was based on blood samples sent by France, but Gallo's fraudulent behavior has always been sheltered by the US government. Finally, Science magazine announced that the photos in Gallo's paper were obviously taken by Montil in France. 199 1 year, the results of a joint investigation by several French research institutions announced that Gallo's virus samples were exactly the same as those given to Gallo by Montil. Gallo finally had to admit to the world that the Wentz virus he isolated came from a virus sample that Montil gave him for identification. At this point, the right to find HIV has finally come to fruition.
16. the moon scam-cheating in the name of science
The famous "moon scam" in history occurred in 1835. On August 25th this year, the newly published New York Sun, with the title "Sir John Herschel has recently made an important astronomical discovery at the Cape of Good Hope", published a news fabricated by a reporter, claiming that the famous British astronomer Herschel saw the moon scenery very clearly with his new telescope. In his works, Herschel's telescope can clearly see various objects on the surface of the moon, including flowers, trees, lakes and monsters. Then, the reporter asked Herschel to find winged humanoid animals on the moon and judge them as rational creatures from their posture. The public's appetite was suspended, and the sales of newspapers rose at a rocket speed. When the news spread in Europe, the Paris Academy of Sciences even held a seminar for this purpose.
The lie was soon exposed. On September 16, The Sun publicly admitted their mistake in fabricating these news. However, this absurd storm lasted for several months before it finally subsided.
17.Al-Sabuti case-scientific swindlers often succeed.
Al-Sabutti was Iraqi, then went to Jordan and finally came to the United States. He swindled all the way, plagiarized a large number of papers to whitewash his resume, thus defrauding the government of a large amount of funding and hanging out among colleges and universities. The method of Al-Sabutti's plagiarism is simple. He retyped other people's published papers, changed the original author's name to his own, and then sent the manuscript to an obscure magazine for publication. His technique has deceived the editors of dozens of science magazines all over the world. Most of the above magazines are inconspicuous, and such plagiarism is difficult to trace. Moreover, although many well-documented plagiarized articles were later revoked, there are still dozens of papers in the computer files of large-scale scientific retrieval, which is the highest authority of scientific literature records.
18. Kinase cascade theory-a fabricated Nobel Prize-winning discovery
1981may, at an academic conference held in cold spring harbor laboratory, spector, a 24-year-old graduate student from Cornell university, explained his latest carcinogenic theory-kinase cascade theory to the participating experts. The idea of this new theory is so clear, the experimental evidence is so conclusive, and the scientific significance is so great that it is immediately considered as a major achievement of the Nobel Prize. Spector and his tutor Lacker jointly published this theory in the journal Science in July 198 1. Many famous researchers turned to this hot topic, but instead of trying to repeat spector's experiment, they gave their reagents to spector for testing.
However, slowly, people found that spector's experimental results could not be repeated by others. Later, a professor of virology in his department finally exposed his fraudulent behavior.
Ironically, although spector Tower falsified the test results to be true, his theory still has some value. Some people say that if spector only writes and publishes it as a hypothesis instead of trying to prove it, he will be recognized as a genius.
19. The forgotten discoverer of pulsars-the Nobel Committee's gender discrimination case
1On August 8th, 967, Susan jocelyn Bell, a female graduate student at Cambridge Radio Observatory, found a strange "jamming" signal on a long recording tape. It was not until165438+1October 28th that Bell successfully recorded the rhythm of this radio source: it sends out a pulse to the earth every 1.33 seconds. Her tutor, Hewish, thinks it may be a signal from an alien civilization-the alien "little green men". Further observation shows that it is a new type of celestial body. The pulse frequency emitted by this celestial body is extremely accurate. Bell found three pulsars in the past observation data. 1968 In February, Bell and hewish jointly reported the discovery of pulsars in the journal Nature, believing that pulsars are neutron stars predicted by physicists. This is an important discovery in the 20th century, but the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 was only placed on the head of the tutor Hervis, and Bell was completely ignored. This behavior of the Nobel Committee was criticized by many scientists and became a famous scandal in the history of the Nobel Prize.
20. Polymer Water Event-"Big Discovery" in Encyclopedia
1962, the Soviet scientist Dejiaquin published papers one after another, claiming that the properties of water were abnormal after being heated in a timely glass capillary-boiling point 500℃, freezing point -8℃. Subsequently, scientists from many countries participated in this research one after another. lippincott, a famous American spectrograph, claimed that he had proved that this kind of water was really unusual after studying it with Raman spectroscopy. This kind of water is polymerized on the surface in time, so it can be named "polymerized water". This further encourages scientists from all over the world to devote themselves to the research of "polymer water". Some people even warned: Never take polymer water out of the laboratory, because it may induce chain polymerization of water and even destroy all kinds of life. Some people even proposed to make "polymer water weapons" to wipe out the enemy cleanly. From 1962 to 1973, more than 450 academic papers on "polymer water" have been published internationally.
Of course, there are also many scientists who strongly oppose the existence of polymer water. In 1973, analytical chemist Luo Xiyou proved in a clever and convincing way that "polymer water" is only water in which sodium, potassium, chlorine and sulfate are dissolved. Dejiaquin, the initiator, also had to make a statement, acknowledging that "polymerized water" is indeed water that dissolves impurities on quartz tubes. As a result, the "big discovery" of gathering water fell through. However, we still found the entry "polymeric water" in the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: "polymeric water is a typical and modern example of experimental artifact, which developed into a fascinating debate before it was finally overthrown by instrumental analysis and theoretical analysis."
The ten-year-long uproar in the scientific community has both scientific research mistakes and human factors, the latter being the main one, which interfered with strict scientific experiments. For example, it is of great significance to be blindly optimistic and fanatical about the "new discovery", to grandstanding, to be eager for success for funding, to be obsessed with news propaganda for controversy, and even to unrealistically exaggerate to the media that they have made scientific progress. However, some journalists who don't know much about science are constantly creating sensational effects in newspapers with a curious attitude, thus further upgrading this "morbid".