Op sounded very confident that the persons allegedly involved _are_, in no uncertain terms, not just definitely total frauds but also definitely engaged in a giant fraud conspiracy that definitely goes all the way to the top. If what they meant was "someone told me once that..." they could have said that instead, but they've chosen to word things very very differently. At best they've drastically overstepped reasonable limits of what claims one is able to rightly make, and that assessment feels extremely generous.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for sharing what I was going to share. Corruption exists where it is allowed by the people who act out of cowardice.
As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research.
Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.
There is a lot less fakery in science than poorly-designed studies, misleading endpoints, underdocumented or incorrectly documented methods, and cargo-culting. The success of the process comes from having a good filtration process to sift through this body of work, and the idea that there will always be some people in the system doing actually good work.
That said, I have also witnessed plenty of low-level fraud: changing of dates to match documentation, discarding "outlier" samples without justification or even documentation, etc. Definitely enough to totally invalidate a result in some cases.
