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).