The scientific method is supposed to be a rational way to try to understand the universe, but:

• Is rational the same as ethical?
• Can science be unethical?

Johann Beringer (1670 – 1738) was a university professor with a number of enemies.

Some of his colleagues thought he was arrogant, so they wanted to ridicule him. They presented him with stones who showed truly remarkable scenes: animals with strange features, astronomical objects and even the word ”God” carved in Hebrew on some of the stones.

Looking at the stones it’s hard to believe anyone could fall for the joke, but Beringer truly thought they were fossilized relics of the Great Flood. He even wrote a book about the discoveries.

When his colleagues revealed the hoax, he didn’t take it lightly!

Beringer’s colleagues were unethical because they planted fake fossils. But Beringer let his religious beliefs get in the way, and abandoned all critical and rational thinking.

What do you think about this case?

In 2002, Victor Ninov and his team presented data that seemed to prove they could form two new heavy elements in the periodic table with an atomic number of 116 and 118.

But other laboratories tried to replicate their findings without any success.

After a long investigation, Ninov was fired. He had planted data because he was the only one who knew how to use the data analysis program.

The thing is... elements 116 and 118 were eventually discovered!

In 1948, Argentinian president Juan Domingo Perón wanted to take his country to a new era thanks to atomic power.

The Austrian physicist Ronald Richter, who had escaped to Argentina after the Second World War, said he could use nuclear fusion to produce limitless and clean energy.

Perón gave him millions and in 1951 it seemed Richter had succeeded.

But it was all a fraud.

Richter was fired.

Hwang Woo-suk is a South Korean geneticist who claimed in 2005 that he had cloned a human embryo and extracted stem cells from it.

In South Korea he was considered a national hero! Some people accused him of several ethics violations, such as buying human eggs for the research.

After much discussion, suspicion and lies, an investigation revealed his findings were all fake.

He lost his job and became a (bad) example of unethical science.

According to Carl Sagan, a nuclear war could lift a dense cloud of dust into the atmosphere, covering Earth and blocking sunlight.

This could cause climate change like the one which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

He later admitted there were errors in his calculations and rectified by saying that a nuclear conflict may only drop temperatures 2 degrees in cold climates.

The nuclear war would still kill us all, but not by freezing us to death!

Andrea Manica is a geneticist at the Cambridge University. In 2015 he completed the whole genome of a man who lived in Ethiopia 4,500 years ago.

According to the DNA found, there were some unexpected connections to other humans in other parts of the planet.

Other geneticists asked for the original data, and when they analyzed them, they found errors.

Completing the genome was like reconstructing a very messy jigsaw puzzle, and Manica had made some mistakes. He admitted them and, to this day, he’s still working in Cambridge.

What went wrong in each of these cases?

Do you know more examples of mistakes or hoaxes in science?