Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers
Ok, I know this is a bit of a stretch, but bear with me: I think we are seeing something similar to the doping scandal that took down Lance Armstrong and many others a while back.<p>There was at least one year&#x27;s Tour de France in which all but one participant were later found to have been doping.  In other words, you didn&#x27;t get to that level of that competitive activity, if you didn&#x27;t cheat, because it wasn&#x27;t possible to outperform people with such a significant advantage.  It actually became a contest, not just of bicycling, but of doping, because getting away with it was quite difficult and it took years for the world of cycling to get good enough countermeasures to shift the advantage to non-doping.<p>Academic research has, for decades now, been a very competitive, high stakes endeavor.  Many fields have more people trying to work in it, than there are spots (i.e. grants and endowed chairs) available.  If you have twice as many aspirants as slots available, and &quot;only&quot; 25% of them cheat (in this case, fudge their data to get more interesting results), then you get something like 50% of your field filled with fraud.<p>Moreover, the closer they are to the top, the higher the likelihood that they are &quot;doping&quot;.<p>I live in Austin, TX, and I remember when nearly all of Lance Armstrong&#x27;s competitors had been busted, but he had not yet.  I said to other people, &quot;well, that&#x27;s it then, he must have been doping.  You can&#x27;t win the Tour de France 7 years in a row against doping opponents, if you&#x27;re clean.  Either doping doesn&#x27;t work, or he was doping.&quot;<p>I recall several people disagreeing, convinced that he was clean.  He wasn&#x27;t clean.