Science as a victim of fraud and forgery

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Science as a victim of fraud and forgery describes deliberately false claims, fabricated or falsified research items generated by people outside the research community.

Causes and motivations for such fraud and falsification can be a desire for recognition and the pursuit of wealth.

By good scientific practice is to prevent, among other things, on such fraud and fall for such fake.

Science as a victim of fraud and forgery must be distinguished from fraud and forgery in science , in which scientists themselves are the fraudsters and forgers.

Such forgeries are often counterfeit artifacts.

Examples

The following cases of science being victims of fraud and counterfeiting have attracted attention beyond their area of ​​expertise:

archeology

  • In 1768 numerous bronze figures appeared in Neubrandenburg : The Prillwitz idols, interpreted as Slavic gods , later turned out to be clever forgeries.
  • The Adlerstein near Würzberg was supposed to point to the discovery of a forged Roman legionary eagle, which was foisted on the antiquities collector Franz I. zu Erbach-Erbach and which was for a long time in the collection of antiquities in Erbach Castle .
  • After the spectacular discovery of the Mescha stele in 1868, numerous inscriptions and artefacts, the so-called Moabitica, were forged around 1870 .
  • Iberian sculptures from Cerro de los Santos ( province of Albacete ) were partly forged and partly revised by adding inscriptions or attributes by D. Juan Amat , a clockmaker from Yecla (Murcia) in the 1870s . In the period that followed, Iberian art was not recognized in research, which only changed again in 1897 with the discovery of the Dama de Elche .
  • Saitaphernes tiara , the supposed gold bonnet of a Scythian king, acquired by the Louvre in 1896 and later exposed as a forgery.
  • Francis Drake's brass plaque was a forgery planned as a joke in California in 1933 by the E Clampus Vitus (ECV) association. Contrary to the intentions of the forgers, it was recognized as genuine by several scientists and important historical institutions. The forgery was not discovered until around forty years later.

biology

  • Richard Meinertzhagen , the largest private collector of stuffed birds and bird skins at the time , wrote a number of standard works on ornithology in the first half of the 20th century. His bird collection later turned out to be partly stolen, partly Meinertzhagen had re-prepared the birds to cover up the thefts, partly the place or date of discovery are incorrectly given. After the scandal broke up, the distribution maps of some bird species had to be redrawn.

History sources

see also: falsification of history
  • The Privilegium Maius , forged on behalf of Rudolf IV , which elevated Austria to the Archduchy and granted the country rights similar to those of the electoral principalities.
  • The Constantinian donation is a legend that should give more weight to the conferment of the Papal State to the Pope (actually King Pippin III. In the year 754) through backdating and attribution to the better known Constantine the Great .
  • The Monita Secreta , which pass themselves off as secret instructions from the Jesuit order general Claudio Acquaviva to his order, were probably created between 1611 and 1614 by Hieronim Zahorowski in order to discredit the Jesuit order.
  • The Florentine Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore invented the inventor of glasses in 1684 and gave him the name Salvino degli Armati . The first doubts arose at the end of the 18th century, but it was not until 1920 that the forgery was finally unmasked.
  • The chaplain Albert Wilkens forged a charter for the Nottuln Abbey and invented 250 years of history in order to be recognized as a local researcher.
  • The alleged statutes of the Venetian State Inquisition were leaked to King Louis XIV and are still used today as evidence of the cruelty of the Serenissima . The historian Samuele Romanin ( Storia documentata di Venezia . Venezia 1853–61) has proven that it is forgeries. They were probably commissioned by Emperor Leopold I's envoy in Venice or by the French envoy. These papers were first published in the history of Venice in 1819 by Count Pierre Daru . According to his account (Vol. II, pp. 143–145, also Vol. IV., Pp. 264–266) these papers were so secret that only the three State Inquisitors - not even their secretary - knew them and only one, always included copy existed. Daru claims to have discovered the alleged documents himself in three complete copies and a further incomplete text.
  • The Königinhofer Manuscript is a forgery, presumably made by Václav Hanka and published by him, of a medieval song collection with 14 poems and poem fragments in epic and lyrical form in the old Czech language. After it was allegedly found in 1817, the manuscript became the basis of a romanticized, national historical image for decades.
  • The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are an anti-Semitic pamphlet designed to support the existence of a world Jewish conspiracy.
  • In his diaries, the British impostor Richard Meinertzhagen presented himself as a participant in numerous events during and after the First World War. They were later regarded by historians as a trustworthy source and found their way into numerous history books.
  • In exile in Zurich, the former National Socialist Hermann Rauschning published detailed records of his alleged conversations with Hitler , which became a bestseller and for a long time were used by research as authentic self-statements by Adolf Hitler . In reality, Rauschning had rarely met Hitler personally, and even then never in private.
  • Emil Lachout wrote a circular dated October 1, 1948 , which was intended to refute the use of poison gas in some concentration camps.
    The Lachout document was exposed as a forgery back in 1989.
  • A letter that the former general and right-wing extremist conspiracy theorist Erich Ludendorff is said to have written in 1933 to his former superior, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg , warning him of Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor , was exposed as a forgery in the 1990s.
  • Josef Stalin's speech to the Central Committee of the CPSU , in which he is said to have explained his calculation on August 19, 1939, to drive Germany and the Western powers into war against each other in order to then attack the weakened capitalist states , is spoken by various representatives of the preventive war thesis listed as evidence. In truth, it was a fake distributed by the French Havas news agency , but from another source, possibly close to the French secret service.
  • The "Dossiers Secrets" in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris were supposed to prove the work of the Prieuré de Sion, which supposedly had existed for centuries, and to declare the forger, Pierre Plantard , the rightful successor of the Merovingians .
  • The Hitler diaries , which the Illustrierte Stern published in 1983 with great advertising expenditure ( “The history of National Socialism must be rewritten!” ), Quickly turned out to be the work of the forger Konrad Kujau .
  • In 1987 the Laichinger Hunger Chronicle was exposed as an anti-Jewish forgery.
  • In 2005 an edition of the Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei appeared, which contained previously unknown ink drawings that were personally ascribed to Galileo. This sensational discovery, found to be genuine by renowned experts in art history, turned out to be a forgery in 2012, which was allegedly brought into the antique trade by the Italian antiquarian and impostor Marino Massimo De Caro .
  • Martin Allen , British author of books on the history of World War II, has used 29 forged papers for his publications that had been tampered with in real files in the National Archives , Kew. These forgeries were discovered in 2004–2008. Everyone himself is urgently suspected of this manipulation; however, the Crown Prosecution Service declined to bring charges because of his poor health.

medicine

  • The geneticist and doctor Karl Illmensee published in 1981 that he was the first in the world to clone three mice. However, his experiments were classified as "scientifically worthless" by a commission of inquiry.
  • A PR agency created advertising texts for their drugs on behalf of a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, under which doctors had their names placed. Between 1997 and 2003, these texts came through the peer-review system of well-known specialist journals, where they then made euphemistic statements on therapeutic success and side effects of the hormone drugs discussed. The Pfizer subsidiary Wyeth was able to generate sales of two billion US dollars with two of these drugs in 2001 alone. When a publicly funded large-scale investigation uncovered the counterfeit, more than 14,000 women sued the pharmaceutical company for damages because they had developed breast cancer after receiving hormone treatment with the advertised products. This case sparked a debate about science ghostwriting.
  • Steven Eaton, formerly an employee of the US company Aptuit, was sentenced to prison in 2013 for manipulating numerous analysis data from clinical trials since 2003 so that inconclusive tests were rated as successful. As a result, several hundred study results had to be checked, and several new active pharmaceutical ingredients came onto the market late.

paleontology

Some Würzburg Lying Stones in the Teylers Museum , Haarlem
  • The goldsmith L. Barth from Stein am Rhein traded successfully in early tertiary fossils from the Öhningen site between 1820 and 1870 . The giant salamander described by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer as Homo diluvii testis , which he misinterpreted as a fossil human who drowned during the flood , also comes from here . Barth's trade went so well that he could no longer meet demand and sold counterfeit pieces. His best-known in-house production is a bird that he put together with great skill from fish bones.
  • In the November 1999 issue of National Geographic , “ Archaeoraptor ”, an alleged link between dinosaurs and birds, was presented in detail, which had previously been imported from China by a US museum. In 2000 the find was confirmed as a "real fossil", but it was assembled from two fossil fragments from different animal species by its discoverer.

Controversial

Crystal skull made of rock crystal
The Turin Shroud, photograph of the face, positive left, negative right (contrast slightly increased)
Vinland map.
Yale University, Kniecke's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 350A
  • A papyrus attributed to Artemidor of Ephesus ("Artemidor papyrus"), on which the allegedly oldest depiction of the Iberian Peninsula is recorded, was possibly made in the 19th century by Konstantinos Simonides or even more recently. The papyrus was acquired in 2004 by the Turin Fondazione per l'Arte della Compagnia di Sanpaolo for 2.75 million euros and then exhibited in various renowned museums. In 2009 the foundation decided to "revise the value of the papyrus in its own balance sheet and set it to zero."
  • The so-called crystal skulls , which are attributed to the advanced cultures of Central and South America . This attribution is controversial, however, since no clear scientifically founded dating can be made with crystals. After analyzing some signs of processing and use, the skulls could also be forgeries from the 19th century.
  • The Turin Shroud , which was dated to the year 1357 through a 1988 radiocarbon dating. However, this finding is again questioned by various researchers, since certain accompanying circumstances such as heat, bacteria or fungi may have falsified the exact dating.
  • The Kensington Runestone was for many years as evidence that the Vikings in the US until the end of the Great Lakes in the area around present-day Duluth (Minnesota) had advanced. In the meantime thought to be a forgery, newer references reveal the possibility of authenticity.
  • The " Vinland map " shows the earliest recorded mapping of North America. It has been viewed as a fake by many researchers, but the latest findings suggest that it is authentic.
  • The Andonian documents are telegrams, most of which are said to have been sent by Talât Pascha . The telegrams contain alleged orders calling for the genocide of the Armenians . These telegrams do not play a significant role in genocide research because a large number of scientists consider them to be forgeries. Others consider them likely to be authentic.
  • The inscription from Parahyba in Brazil allegedly proved contact of the Phoenicians with the New World, but was then classified as a forgery. Later, in the early 2nd half of the 20th century, a number of specialists spoke out against the background of more recent findings for its authenticity, while this was vehemently denied by others. Since the original of the inscribed stone tablet has disappeared (there are only copies left), this issue can no longer be resolved.

See also

literature

  • Karl Corino (Ed.): Forged! Fraud in politics, literature, science, art and music . Eichborn, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-8218-1131-5 .
  • Torsten Junge, Dörthe Ohlhoff: Insanely brilliant. The Mad Scientist Reader . Alibri, Aschaffenburg, 2004, ISBN 3-932710-79-7 .
  • Jennifer Couzin, Katherine Unger: Cleaning up the paper trail. In: Science Volume 312, April 7, 2006, pp. 38-43 (an article on the - minor - consequences of proven fraud for the fraudsters).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ricardo Olmos : The Iberian culture from the perspective of research. In: Michael Koch (Ed.): The Iberians. Exhibition catalog Bonn 1998, ISBN 3-7774-7710-9 , pp. 75–81.
  2. ^ Pierre Antoine Noel Bruno Count of Daru: History of the Republic of Venice. 4 vols. Leipzig 1821, 1824; 8 vol .; 28 parts in 7 books Stuttgart 1828; 4 vols. Leipzig 1854, 21859 (French first in 6 vols. + Register volume Paris 1819, 6 vols. + 2 register volumes 1821; 9 vols. 41853) The 4th volume of the German edition from 1859, the pages are identical to the from 1854, was reprinted photomechanically in 2010 and again in 2012, the 3rd volume in 2011.
  3. ↑ Sergej Slutsch: Stalin's "War Scenario 1939". A speech that never existed. The story of a fake . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4 (2004), pp. 597–636 ( PDF , accessed on August 3, 2010)
  4. ↑ Markus Becker: Galileo's first images of the moon discovered , Der Spiegel on March 30, 2007, accessed on December 30, 2013
  5. ↑ Irene Brückle, Oliver Hahn, Paul Needham, Horst Bredekamp (eds.), Galileo's O , Akademie Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005095-9
  6. ↑ Elisabetta Povoledo: At Root of Italy Library's Plunder, a Tale of Entrenched Practices , The New York Times, August 11, 2012, accessed January 1, 2014
  7. ↑ Nicholas Schmidle: “A Very Rare Book”. The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo's pivotal treatise , The New Yorker , December 16, 2013, p. 62
  8. ↑ Stephan Speicher: Behind the Moon , Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 21, 2013, p. 11
  9. ↑ Hanno Rauterberg: The fake moon , Die Zeit , December 27, 2013, accessed on December 29, 2013
  10. ↑ Ernst Haiger: Fiction, Facts, and Forgeries. The "Revelations" of Peter and Martin Allen about the History of the Second World War. In: The Journal of Intelligence History 6, Summer 2006 (published 2007), No. 1, ISSN  1616-1262 , pp. 105-117; ders .: Forgeries on the history of the Second World War in the British National Archives . - In: Christian Müller-Straten: Counterfeit Detection , Vol. 2. Verlag Dr. Christian Müller-Straten, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-932704-85-7 , pp. 211-221.
  11. ↑ Peter Mühlbauer : Lack of quality control in closed-access journals. For years, a PR agency was able to place promotional items as a science on behalf of a pharmaceutical company . In: Telepolis , September 10, 2010. On the debate, cf. u. a. Ewen Callaway: Questions over ghostwriting in drug industry. Analysis claims papers drafted by medical writers downplayed risks of hormone replacement therapy . In: Nature , September 7, 2010, doi: 10.1038 / news.2010.453 . Adriane J. Fugh-Berman: The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold “HRT” . In: PLoS Medicine , September 7, 2010, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pmed.1000335 .
  12. ^ The Financial Times, March 12, 2013: Man guilty of manipulating drug tests.
    Nature. Volume 495, No. 7441, 2013, p. 286, full text : Drug-data deceit.
  13. ↑ Manfred Deckers: The Würzburg lying stones and other forgeries of fossils. In: On the subject of counterfeiting. "DIAGONAL - Journal of the University-Gesamtthochschule-Siegen", 1994 (Issue 2), p. 69, ISSN  0938-7161 .
  14. ↑ How the Archaeoraptor was forged. On: Wissenschaft.de from April 2, 2001
    The Fake Fossil ( Memento from April 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  15. ↑ Luciano Bossina: The Artemidor papyrus is the product of a digital reproduction. In: FAZ , June 25, 2009, p. 8.