Status: Scientific fraud
A Norwegian doctor, Jon Sudbo, who published an article in the
Lancet last year suggesting that aspirin could reduce the risk of oral cancer, has been accused of
making up the data in his study. Specifically, he invented almost all of the 900 patients in the study (or at least half of them, by other accounts). The director of the hospital where he worked said:
"he faked everything: names, diagnosis, gender, weight, age, drug use." Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, said:
"What I've been told is that he sat in front of his computer and made the whole dataset up and convinced his co-authors it was genuine... It's completely inexplicable." I guess that's one way to avoid having to get consent forms signed.
Other journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, are now
finding evidence of fraud in articles they published by Sudbo.
Comments
The second weird thing is that it lasted long enough to see print at all! After all, he was making somewhat sensational claims, and such research are usually even more heavily scrutinized than other work.