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There are some fields where you can get away with talking nonsense.

For example, in politics, you could tell everyone you were a hugely successful businessman who would make the country great again, and get elected, without having the faintest idea what you were actually doing.

In the field of science, however, your nonsense will eventually be found out, and the past 50 years have exposed a number of fraudsters and misinformation peddlers.

Gizmodo asked three historians of science to pick their biggest fraud of the past half-century, starting with Robert N. Proctor, Professor of the History of Science.

He says, hands down, it’s the Council for Tobacco Research, the cigarette industry’s chief instrument for denying that cigarettes cause cancer:

That began in 1954, as part of Big Tobacco’s effort to distract from the evidence that cigarettes cause death. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into this effort, with the money going to top scholars at the world’s leading universities. Basically anyone willing to say that something other than cigarettes was causing cancer…

Tobacco’s deception is “the greatest” because it paved the way for other kinds of scientific fraud. If Big Carbon today claims that “we need more research” to find out whether the climate is warming, that’s a trick learned from Big Tobacco.

Big Tobacco knew that their day of reckoning would come, but they cannot have known how widely their fraud would be imitated. It would be hard to name a more deadly scientific fraud, and for that reason we can rank it “the greatest.”

Imagine living in a time when smoking wasn’t considered harmful to your health? There you are, puffing away guilt-free, none the wiser.

Next up, they asked Katherine A. Pandora, Associate Professor, History of Science, The University of Oklahoma.

Her answer is particularly interesting, given the recent COVID-19 vaccine breakthroughs that have dominated the news:

I would nominate the opportunistic 1998 and 2002 research articles by Andrew Wakefield and his twelve co-authors that claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was linked with the development of autism as the biggest fraud of the last 50 years. The disregard of scientific authorities and the media for strict scrutiny of Wakefield’s claim that was short-handed to “vaccines cause autism” had severe international consequences in terms of vaccine hesitation for childhood illnesses over the last two decades, and still presents ramifications today for the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine research.

Image: Getty Images/Peter Macdiarmid

The Wakefield studies were examples of fraud committed out in the open, which makes the freedom with which they flourished especially unnerving.

The fact that The Lancet, the prestigious medical journal that first published the study, soon retracted Wakefield’s paper didn’t stop the misinformation from gaining traction, and anti-vaxxers continue to trot out the ‘vaccines cause autism’ line, despite a lack of any credible evidence.

Fun fact – Andrew Wakefield is now dating Elle Macpherson, and she’s gone full anti-vaxxer, too.

Finally, there’s Felicitas Hesselmann, a Research Assistant, Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin.

She took a more holistic approach, and opted not to choose a single, standout case:

On the one hand, all cases (and even allegations) of scientific fraud or misconduct are big in their own way…

On the other hand, no fraud case I can think of has been so big as to fundamentally change the course of research. Many researchers have a strong belief that science has a way of working itself out…

Claiming that some cases are “bigger” than others, in that sense, would also mean to prioritize some types of knowledge and research over others, which is a fight I would prefer not to pick.

Boring – we came for the fight, Felicitas.

I wonder what historians of science will look back on in 50 years time and say ‘damn, you got it wrong’.

Climate change denialists would have to be right up there.

[source:gizmodo]