The 6 Ballsiest Scientific Frauds (People Actually Fell For)

Instead of being banned from science forever, he simply headed over to Jefferson Medical College where he continued to wow others with his total lack of knowledge until his extensive plagiarism finally caught up with him. He skirted from the University of Virginia to Boston University to Monsour Medical Center to setting up his own private practice for several years. Eventually his medical license was revoked everywhere but in Pennsylvania.

Shortly thereafter, he was "killed" in a car accident in South Africa. We put "killed" in "quotes" because his death certificate mysteriously never showed up anywhere. Hmmm.

Nerd Mountain.

Since discovering unknown mammals seemed to work out so well the first time, he just kept announcing more discoveries, despite the fact that he never technically found any. He was elected a fellow in the Society of Antiquaries and went on to study sea serpents and a new species of human. You'll be interested to know we haven't gotten to the "official" fraud part of his life yet.

Dawson's huge discovery was Piltdown Man. It was a skull found in a gravel pit in England supposedly belonging to a new kind of early human. It was the missing link. It was complete shit.

In 1912, Dawson's discovery shook the entire world of evolutionary biology. The skull had the cranial capacity of a modern human but the jaw of an ape, indicating our brains had developed well before we had adapted to new types of food. The reason Piltdown Man convinced scientists that this was true was because Dawson had fastened the jaw of an orangutan to a human skull and filed down the teeth. This hoax was so retarded that the scientific community embraced it. For 40 years.

In total, after it was noted that Dawson's fossil was some shit he made in his garage, researchers looked into the rest of discoveries and noted that he made up at least 38 of them. Dawson had even claimed to have found a second Piltdown Man but never provided any evidence of such before he died, so we're left to assume it was a chimp skull in a prehistoric unemployment line, indicating a link between apes and Lehman Brothers.

In 2001, Ranjit Chandra had published a study in Nutrition Research, which is just as exciting as it sounds, about how some multivitamins he had patented could reverse memory problems in old folks. Curiously, the exact same paper had been submitted to the British Medical Journal and had been rejected after reviewers said it had "all the hallmarks of having been completely invented." So it was the medical equivalent of everything Scientologists believe; only pawned off as real. So it was like everything Scientologists believe.

Unfortunately for Chandra, he hadn't just lied, he lied big. If you're a hunter and you claim to have shot a deer that was the size of a dump truck, most folks will smile and nod and let it go at that. If you claim to have shot Bigfoot and have his carcass at home and write a paper about it and submit it to world famous journals for others to read about, you have committed what some people refer to as "lying like a retard."

The claims Chandra made in his study were so amazing they started getting mainstream media attention and were printed in the New York Times which meant more people who can tell their assholes from grape jelly got a hold of it and noticed he was full of shit. This in turn lead people to wonder what else the good doctor had been doing all his life.

In the 1980s, Chandra was contracted by Ross Pharmaceuticals, now Abbott Nutrition, and makers of such things as Similac, Ensure and other vaguely nauseating healthy liquids, to do a study on their products and food allergies in newborns. Nestle and Mead Johnson hopped on board as well and Chandra just needed to find 288 newborns to do his work.

"Dammit, we need more babies."

A year later, the study was done despite the fact he didn't have nearly enough babies. Now that's Science! More impressive than how Chandra got the study done was his results that showed the Nestle and Mead Johnson formulas protected babies from allergies but the Ross Pharmaceuticals brands did not, even though they make the stuff from pretty much the same ingredients.

When confronted by the bullshit police, Chandra got a boost from a fellow scientist who backed up everything he said. Chandra's reliable scientist buddy worked in India. But had a mailing address at a Canadian post office. And worked in a made-up medical clinic (as if you couldn't already tell, Chandra never quite got lying like everybody else on this list).

Also, he kind of looks like a tool.

During the doctor's divorce trial it came to light he had about 120 bank accounts spread around the world housing $2 million. It's believed most of the money came from studies he was paid to conduct that he either never did or just bullshitted his way through, meaning he may be a shitastic liar, but at least he managed his finances well.

Some of what the brothers wrote include intense things like:

"The plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space S3, that of Euclidean space E4 (described by the family of instantons Ibeta of whatever radius beta), and, finally, that of Lorentzian space-time M4."

To put that in terms you may understand, imagine a paper on Batman that said the following:

"The full force of the Batarang (B) when properly extruded at the Riddler's tomfoolery (Tf), factoring in the resistance from Robin's homoerotic costuming(QUeer) and the Joker's reliance on governmental subsidies to pay for low-grade dementia medications (M) can be summed up by the equation B2 x πr2 = The Green Hornet."

Technically you can read all those words, but they're about as retarded as a typical plotline in a Michael Bay movie.

The papers got published because apparently physics and mathematics professors know about as much about physics and math as they do about not getting sand kicked in their faces at the beach. The official word after the fact was everyone blaming someone else for not carefully reading the papers and having them go through anyway. This article you're reading right now is going to be re-published in Physics & Science Today! for that very reason.

Eventually, real physicists started questioning the Bogdanovs, who continued defending their work, going so far as to make up physicists and then have their pretend physicists e-mail real physicists to defend what they wrote. And while no one seems to have been fooled by that, the fact remains they both now have PhDs and a French TV show based entirely around their ability to slap a bunch of retarded words that have little to no meaning on paper and get it published. [Note: If you guys ever lose your TV show, you're exactly the kind of writers we need here at Cracked.- Ed.]