This is sort of true conditionally, but for the most part involves applied sciences where there is an economic benefit, and like all sciences the bad science is weeded out. In the basic sciences and the sciences of evolution there is insufficient economic benefit to make research fraudulent.
Though there have been fraudulent research that was found and corrected, because the unscrupulous scientists were in it for personal gain
The greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century is not so well known outside of professional paleontologist circles.
evolutionnews.org
This Fossil Friday features conodont microfossils from the Triassic of the Himalaya region in India (
Goel 1977) to illustrate a veritable crime story. You may have heard of cases of fraud in paleontology such as the famous hoaxes of Piltdown Man and
Archaeoraptor, but the greatest scientific fraud of the century is not so well known outside of professional paleontologist circles. It was Indian scientist
Vishwa Jit Gupta, professor of geology at Panjab University, who played the “star role” in this biggest case of fraud in paleontology and maybe all of science ever (
Lewin 1989).
A Dubious Accident
Gupta was India’s most celebrated paleontologist, with 455 scientific publications (including two
Nature papers and five books), when the scandal started to come to light in 1989 (
Talent 1989,
Lewin 1989,
Anderson 1991,
Nature 1993), but it took nine years for the total truth and magnitude of the scandal to be revealed (
Ruffell et al. 2012,
Webster 2016). It turned out that over 30 years of research with 126 gullible co-authors, Gupta had falsified data, stolen fossils from colleagues and collections around the world, and then claimed to have found them in the Himalayas, often in made-up localities and layers. Gupta’s “fraudulent practices have involved most invertebrate phyla as well as the vertebrates and include fossils of Cambrian to Cenozoic age” (
Webster et al. 1993). Gupta did not only commit scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale, but he even issued death threats with head money to whistleblowers including Australian geologist John Talent, one of whom one was actually killed in a dubious accident (
Carleton 2005,
Ruffell et al. 2012). After a final report in 1994 found Gupta guilty of all charges, “an article in the Indian weekly
The World called for Gupta to be stripped of his PhD and DSc degrees, both of which had been demonstrated to be based upon fraudulent work.
Though the academic world outright condemned Gupta, and corrected his work. Corruption among authorities in India limited their criticism.