Scientific development is fundamental to our lives, after all, it was thanks to this that we were able to develop as a global society. It is possible to see a scientific contribution in every aspect of our lives, such as the functioning of our electronic devices or the advances in current medicine. However, the character of being changeable and constantly evolving makes science an ideal environment for the emergence and creation of fraud.
Science tends to be methodical and dispenses with personal beliefs and opinions, relying solely on evidence and experiments. However, scientists are human beings and, although rare, they also put their convictions ahead of scientific logic.
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Some of these negligences take years to be denied and can spread at high speed, which undermines the credibility of the scientific community. So we made a list so you know some of the biggest lies created in the history of science.
Therefore, we separate some of the main frauds ever made in the scientific world. Discover some of the biggest scams scientific already created.
Vaccines cause autism
This fraud is one of the most famous in the world scientific and, in the last two years, scientists have had to fight hard to disprove it. It emerged in 1998, when gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefiled and twelve other researchers published an article in the English journal The Lancet associating cases of autism with the MMR vaccine.
The article contained manipulated data and disrespected ethical norms in research with humans. Only 10 years after publication, in 2009, the journal annulled the article and the original researchers recanted, but Wakefiled did not apologize and had its medical license revoked in England.
Sigmund Freud did not cure a patient as he said in his book
In the book Infantile neurosis and other works, Freud reports having cured, through psychoanalysis, the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankeev, who suffered from severe depression. However, the patient was never actually cured, because, after his release from Freud's clinic, he was admitted to psychiatric hospitals several times in the following years.
Shortly before his death, the patient told a newspaper that he felt the same way he did when he was being treated by Freud.
X ray
The 19th and 20th centuries were marked by several discoveries in the world of Physics, such as X-ray, radioactivity and fundamental particles (electron, neutron, proton). There was an atmosphere of competitiveness and competition for discovery among scientists, which instigated them to try to create something new.
This was the case of Prosper-René Blondlot, a French physicist who was experimenting with X-rays and noticed a luminosity in his detector that did not come from X-rays. He would then have discovered a new form of radiation coming from the material he was studying by repeating the experiment several times. However, when trying to repeat the experiment, other scientists were unable to find the N rays that Blondlot claimed to have found.
To discover the truth behind this story, Nature sent a physicist to the Frenchman's laboratory. There he discovered that the phenomenon was only seen by laboratory workers and Blondlot himself, leading to believe that it was something psychological.
Discovery of the structure of DNA
Probably, in school, you have heard about the fluid-mosaic model, which would have been proposed by Watson-Crick. This model was launched by two British scientists in 1953 in the magazine nature, however, scientist Rosalind Franklin, responsible for the DNA photographs, received no credit.
It is worth mentioning that the photographs, constructed using the X-ray diffraction technique, were fundamental for the elaboration of the DNA structure and model.