re: #266 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

That Japanese stem cell scientist angered the fuck out of me precisely because it was like, “Really, stem cells? You had to pick stem cells to lie about? And you had to lie about it in Nature, not, like, in the Shanghai Journal of Iffy Biological Practices?”

When I was at Cornell, there was a graduate student named Mark Spector. He was every prof’s dream - worked 14 hours/day, had no social life, produced amazing results on an extremely hot topic. He linked tyrosine kinase cascades, oncogenes, and cancer all in a neat little package. After only two years, he was wrapping up his thesis, interviewing for tenured positions at MIT and other top rank universities, and there were whispers of Nobel prizes.

It was all completely made up. He spent those 14hrs a day concocting his results.

The crazy thing about it is that one of the cornerstones of Science is reproducibility. He cannot have expected to get away with it, any more than Rosey Ruiz could expect to get away with ‘winning’ the Boston marathon. But he did it anyway.

Months after he was exposed, we heard he was living in the Israel House at Cornell, telling everyone he’d been framed by an antisemitic German professor.