Science: Fudging Data for Fun and Profit

The latest research scandal raises some ugly questions

Fellow researchers were awed by young Mark Spector's golden touch in the lab: he could often complete in a matter of days complex experiments that took others weeks and even months to do. Shortly after he entered Cornell University in 1980 as a graduate student in biochemistry, Spector was working with some of the most eminent men in his field. Most remarkable of all, at age 24, Spector seemed on the verge of proving a bold new theory explaining how tumor-causing viruses could turn a cell...

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