In his new book, Fraud in the Lab, journalist and former lab researcher Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis explores why cases of scientific misconduct around the world are rising. In this extract, he highlights a systematic dishonesty at the heart of establishment science.

Is every scientific article a fraud? This question may seem puzzling to those outside the scientific commu­nity. After all, anyone who took a philosophy course in college is likely to think of laboratory work as eminently rational. The as­sumption is that a researcher faced with an enigma posed by nature formulates a hypothesis, then conceives an experiment to test its va­lidity. The archetypal presentation of articles in the life sciences fol­lows this fine intellectual form: after explaining why a particular question could be asked (introduction) and describing how he or she intends to proceed to answer it (materials and methods), the re­searcher describes the content of the experiments (results), then in­terprets them (discussion). 

A Good Story 

This is more or less the outline followed by millions of scientific ar­ticles published every year throughout the world. It has the virtue of being clear and solid in its logic. It appears transparent and free of any presuppositions. However, as every researcher knows, it is pure falsehood. In reality, nothing takes place the way it is described in a scientific article. The experiments were carried out in a far more disordered manner, in stages far less logical than those related in the article. If you look at it that way, a scientific article is a kind of trick. In a radio conversation broadcast by the BBC in 1963, the British scientist Peter Medawar, cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960, asked, “Is the scientific paper a fraud?”As was announced from the outset of the program, his answer was un­hesitatingly positive. “The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.” 

To demonstrate, Medawar begins by giving a caustically lucid description of scientific articles in the 1960s, one that happens to remain accurate to this day: “First, there is a section called ‘introduction’ in which you merely describe the general field in which your scientific talents are going to be exercised, followed by a section called ‘pre­vious work’ in which you concede, more or less graciously, that others have dimly groped towards the fundamental truths that you are now about to expound.” 

According to Medawar, the “methods” section is not problematic. However, he unleashes his delightfully witty eloquence on the “re­sults” section: “[It] consists of a stream of factual information in which it is considered extremely bad form to discuss the significance of the results you are getting. You have to pretend firmly that your mind is, so to speak, a virgin receptacle, an empty vessel, for infor­mation which floods into it from the eternal world for no reason which you yourself have revealed.” 

Was Medawar a curmudgeon? An excessively suspicious mind, overly partial to epistemology? Let’s hear what another Nobel lau­reate in physiology or medicine (1965), the Frenchman François Jacob, has to say. The voice he adopts in his autobiography is more literary than Medawar’s, but no less evocative: