Epic fraud: How to succeed in science (without doing any)
Running scientific experiments is, frankly, a pain in the ass. Sure, it's incredibly satisfying when days or weeks of hard work produce a clean-looking result that's easy to interpret. But often as not, experiments simply fail for no obvious reason. Even when they work, the results often leave you scratching your head, wondering "what in the world is that supposed to tell me?"
The simplest solution to these problems is obvious: don't do experiments. (Also, don't go out into the field to collect data, which adds the hazards of injury, sunburn, and exotic disease to the mix.) Unfortunately, data has somehow managed to become the foundation of modern science—so you're going to need to get some from somewhere if you want a career. A few brave souls have figured out a way to liberate data from the tyranny of experimentation: they simply make it up.
Dr. Yoshitaka Fujii seems well on his way to becoming the patron saint of scientific fraudsters, setting a record for the most extensive output of fake data. As near as anyone can work out, Fujii started making up data with abandon some time in the 1990s. By 2000, his fellow researchers were already on to him, publishing a comment in which they noted, "We became skeptical when we realized that side effects were almost always identical in all groups."
