This is horrible but I am glad that someone with courage spoke up. From the American Association for the Advancement of Science (known as triple-A S) Science Magazine:
Whistleblower sues Duke, claims doctored data helped win $200 million in grants
On a Friday in March 2013, a researcher working in the lab of a prominent pulmonary scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was arrested on charges of embezzlement. The researcher, biologist Erin Potts-Kant, later pled guilty to siphoning more than $25,000 from the Duke University Health System, buying merchandise from Amazon, Walmart, and Target—even faking receipts to legitimize her purchases. A state judge ultimately levied a fine, and sentenced her to probation and community service.
Then Potts-Kant's troubles got worse. Duke officials took a closer look at her work and didn't like what they saw. Fifteen of her papers, mostly dealing with pulmonary biology, have now been retracted, with many notices citing "unreliable" data. Several others have been modified with either partial retractions, expressions of concern, or corrections. And last month, a U.S. district court unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former colleague of Potts-Kant. It accuses the researcher, her former supervisor, and the university of including fraudulent data in applications and reports involving more than 60 grants worth some $200 million. If successful, the suit—brought under the federal False Claims Act (FCA)—could force Duke to return to the government up to three times the amount of any ill-gotten funds, and produce a multimillion-dollar payout to the whistleblower.
The Duke case "should scare all [academic] institutions around the country," says attorney Joel Androphy of Berg & Androphy in Houston, Texas, who specializes in false claims litigation. It appears to be one of the largest FCA suits ever to focus on research misconduct in academia, he says, and, if successful, could "open the floodgates" to other whistleblowing cases.
Good - false claims would also cover the cherry-picking and poor modeling used in the study of anthropogenic global warming. Time to put the fear of God into these people and blow the wheels off the AGW bus.
Also of interest - from PLOS One:
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy. Many surveys have asked scientists directly whether they have committed or know of a colleague who committed research misconduct, but their results appeared difficult to compare and synthesize. This is the first meta-analysis of these surveys.
A bit more:
A pooled weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.
Disgusting. Most of this "research" is funded with public money (our tax dollars at work) - we need to be able to hold them accountable and to be able to see their research. It took years for Michael Mann to publish the math behind his hockey stick temperature curve and people were able to find the flaws almost immediately - he cherry picked his data. His model is so bad that when you feed it statistically random data, it still churns out a hockey stick.
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