Fraud Fraud?

The most interesting response in this Gizmodo story in which some scientists were asked to name the biggest scientific fraud of the last 30 years comes from a lady named Felicitas Hessellmann, a researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Most frauds, she said, aren't all that big. Really big frauds can be hard to pull off, especially in a world of instant communication. So most frauds are middle of the road, making it hard to find a big one, let alone name one as more fraudulent than another.

On the other hand, the ones the other two interviewees name -- the tobacco industry's in-house research labs and the claim that vaccines cause autism -- were pretty big frauds. So maybe the answer's usually somewhere in between.