Earth Bytes: 2008-03-02

For all things related to fraud in Indian science go to the excellent blog by the IISc Professor Prof.Abinandanam.

The infamous VJ Gupta case remains fresh in the minds of scientists in India. The audacity of these frauds makes one think about the plethora of unreported or undetected cases of plagiarism. Many in academics or in the laboratories would have witnessed their colleagues, or their guides, or their students resorting to subtle plagiarism. Its almost sure that if one feeds a sentence from the Introduction of most Indian PhD thesis into Google, it will throw up an already published paper, most often from a foreign source. Its simply a cut-and-paste job from the internet onto the thesis pages. Invariably this happens, cutting across subject areas and geography. PhD theses do not get as rigorous a review as do papers submitted to journals and suprevising teachers rarely bother about such "s u n d r y" matters. This is the first step towards plagiarism.

“Even researchers from some high profile institutes like the IITs are indulging in plagiarism,” says Dr KL Chopra, who is the Ex-Director of IIT, Kharagpur and the president of the New Delhi-based Society for Scientific Values, which is dedicated to detecting scientific fraud and is the only one of its kind in India.

The following cases are being pursued by the society and I post the contents verbatim from the society's website. Its clear that even Indian Institute of Technology or even the moralizing Centre for Science and Environment are free from this malaise. More shockingly, there is hardly any move to punish the offence.

Investigations of Recent cases of Plagiarism by the Society for Scientific Values (SSV)

Professor V S Rajput, Kumaon Univ:

Prof. Kavita Pandey, Head, Physics Department, Kumaon University brought to the attention of SSV, and a number of prominent particle physicists in India and abroad that Prof Rajput, a former Head of the same department and presently serving as the Vice Chancellor of the University, in co-authorship with his research students have indulged in serious unethical practices of plagiarization of published research papers of others, as also of publishing same/similar papers in more than one journal. The SSV examined the published papers in question, and sought information/ clarification from both Prof. Pandey and Prof. Rajput. Prof. Rajput maintains that his former research student and his co-author has plagiarized the paper and has put his name on the paper without his permission. Merit of this argument apart, as the VC, Prof. Rajput has taken no disciplinary action so far against his former student and presently his faculty member of the University. Having confirmed this serious case of plagiarism and unethical practices, as has also been done by several other prominent Particle Physicists in India and abroad, the SSV has written to the President of India, the Governor of Uttaranchal ( who is the Chancellor of the University), Minister, MHRD, and the Chairman, UGC, urging them to take a strict disciplinary action against Prof. Rajput. After considerable moral pressure by a number of scientists world over, the Chancellor has now set up an enquiry committee under the Chair of a retired Judge. The SSV feels strongly that prominent scientists in the field best judge scientific unethical practices and thus their verdict should be taken seriously for taking an appropriate action. We hope that a decision to refer such a case to a retired Judge does not meet the usual fate of a long enquiry, ultimately resulting in diluting the seriousness of such a case.
Drs. Rashmi Mishra and Sapna Johnson, Centre for Science & Environment, New Delhi & Padma Vankar, FEAT, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur:

Rashmi Mishra et al have submitted a paper " Analysis of Pesticide Residues in Fruits and Vegetables from different Mandis of Delhi " to J Analytical-Science for publication. This paper has been largely plagiarized from a paper " Monitoring of Pesticide Residues in Summer Fruits and Vegetables from Kanpur" published in Bulletin Environmental Contamination and Toxicology by Dr R Sanghi and Dr V. Tewari of Facility for Ecological and Analytical Testing ( FEAT), IIT, Kanpur. The SSV has examined the two papers and have verified that Rasmi Mishra et al have not only plagiarised the paper extensively but have also made false claims. The SSV has written to Dr Sunita Narayan , Director, Centre for Science & Environment and Prof. S G Dhande, Director , IIT, Kanpur to seek their comments and to urge them to take appropriate disciplinary actions against their respective colleagues, if called for. Dr Narayan has informed that Dr. Vankar did not seek permission of her two colleagues in the Centre to be the co-authors of the paper. Nevertheless , she has taken steps to see that such a thing is not repeated . What these steps are and how Dr. Padma Vankar, who is also a Consultant to the Centre for Science and Environment, is affected, has not been clarified. On the other hand, Prof Dhande has not bothered to respond, despite reminders. We, however, understand that Prof. Dhande set up an Enquiry Committee, the report of which is with him for over two months. The SSV is very concerned that an Institute of national importance is not prepared to face the reality of a scientific fraud committed by a scientist of the institute and to take suitable action as a deterrent for such unethical practices. Having exhausted our moral power of persuasion, this case is being brought to the attention of the Chairman, BOG, IIT Kanpur, Minister, MHRD and is also being put on our Web page (www.scientificvalues.org). We hope the institutions concerned will deem it important to have researchers imbibe ethics and values in the pursuit of science and technology.

There is plenty of information available on the internet about plagiarism in Science in India, and possibly the Geocities site of 2003 that garnered support for the case against B.S.Rajput is unique. It was the first such attempt at publicly soliciting help in exposing a fraud, and it succeeded in its purpose. The wikipedia article on scientific plagiarism in India is also comprehensive, but misses the VJ Gupta case altogether.

Here is a list of online resources on the topic of plagiarism in India:

Physics

http://www.geocities.com/physics_plagiarism/
[pdf and ps versions of Rajput's papers as well as the original ones can be downloaded from the site to decide for oneself about the plagiarism involved]

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0295-5075/61/3/429/
[Institute of Physics' retraction of Rajput's paper and its apology to Renata Kallosh of Stanford University Physics Dept. It says that "the article Axion-dilation black holes with SL(2,Z) symmetry through APT-FGP model by S. C. Joshi and B. S. Rajput, published in Europhysics Letters, 57 (2002) 639, should be considered withdrawn from publication. This article contains no new results, but instead plagiarizes from the article Superpotential from black holes (Phys. Rev. D, 54 (1996) R4709) by Renata Kallosh. Apart from some well-known introductory review material (ending two sentences below eq. (4)) and the first half of the Discussion, the text of the paper has been copied literally from Professor Kallosh's article. Europhysics Letters apologises to Professor Kallosh and regrets that this has not been noticed during the refereeing process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_plagiarism_in_India [wiki article]

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/publications/PDFfiles/india.pdf [Nobel laureates' letter to APJ Abdul Kalam, on the BS Rajput case]

http://www.indianexpress.com/india-news/full_story.php?content_id=17786 [news article]

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/02/07/stories/2003020705470103.htm [news article]

http://www.cpim.org/pd/2002/oct20/10202002_uttaranchal.htm [news article]

http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl1925/stories/20021220008813400.htm [news article]

Electrical Engineering
http://www.geocities.com/electrical_plagiarism/ [NERIST K Kumar case, 2007-08]

Biology

http://www.scientificvalues.org/kundu_case.html
[National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, India's very controversial case, in which the NCCS's internal committee indicted the the authors, Gopal Kundu et al, whereas a later external committe, headed by Padmanabhan exonerated Kundu. But the Society for Scientific Values, has said that the case stands]

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jun102007/1471.pdf
[Padmanabhan's letter-to-the-editor on the Kundu case]]

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/aug102007/281.pdf
[Rahul Siddharthan's (Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India) letter in Current Science]

http://nanopolitan.wordpress.com/about/
[Prof T. A. Abinandanan's IISc, Dept of Materials Engg blog

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/mar102008/553.pdf
Prof. S. Mahadevan's (Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics,
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India) take on plagiarism and his experiements with the citation-matching tool eTBLAST.

Economics

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/399980.cms
[The case of Harshal Pathak, who plagiarised his father, DS Pathak's thesis to secure a Ph.D in Economics]

Hindi

http://www.taralabalu.org/Suta%20Samhita/plagiarism/
[Dr Ramakant Jha of the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth University, Banares (Varanasi) is alleged to have copied major portions of Dr Shivamurthy Swamiji's thesis of 1976 for his PhD degree.]

Geology

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551.600-himalayan-scandal-rocks-indian-science-.html

plagiarism gupta1
2008 04 04 QUESTIONS OF FRAUD Gilbert Klapper Chicago Literary Club April 11, 2005 Horace Freeland Judson (2004). http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #1 “A Culture of Fraud” – At the beginning of his first of several essays on the Piltdown Forgery, in which he attempted to identify the perpetrators, the paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, Stephen Jay Gould wrote: “Nothing is quite so fascinating as a well aged mystery. Many connoisseurs regard Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time as the greatest detective story ever written because its protagonist is Richard III, not the modern and insignificant murderer of Roger Ackroyd. The old chestnuts are perennial sources for impassioned and fruitless debate. Who was Jack the Ripper? Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?”1 I wish to review two examples of fraud in some detail: the first a lesser known but singularly egregious case in paleontology; the second, Piltdown, “surely the most famous and spectacular fraud of twentieth century science.”2 My claimed expertise is in micropaleontology and I have some personal familiarity with the first case. But I write as a lay person in viewing the story of the Piltdown Forgery for I do not have training as a paleoanthropologist. Nonetheless, I have followed the seemingly unstoppable writings on Piltdown, at least since one of my two mentors at Stanford in the 1950s, A. Myra Keen, wrote a short essay in Natural History magazine in 19773. I visited my longtime colleague, Willi Ziegler, at Marburg University in Germany in August, 1978, as we had a few days to combine our respective parts of a review paper on Devonian conodonts. I should explain that conodonts are the skeletal remains of an extinct group related to the most primitive fossil fish. They were a once prolific marine organism that swam in the seas of the Devonian Period (extending from about 360 to 420 Ma = million years before present), as well as other periods of the Paleozoic Era and the earliest period of the Mesozoic Era. Conodonts are commonly found preserved as microscopic teeth and are used to date and correlate Devonian limestones throughout the then tropical world of a vastly different continental configuration than today. While visiting Professor Ziegler, I met another colleague, John Pickett, who was at Marburg on sabbatical leave from the Geological Survey of New South Wales in Sydney. Pickett was studying a limestone succession he collected together with John Talent along a highway road cut at Phulchauki in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal. [Talent and Pickett are both well known Australian paleontologists – more about John Talent later in this discussion]. This was a fossil site that had previously yielded a prolific fauna of conodonts from the late part of the Devonian Period (at about 380 Ma), according to a publication in 1975 by Professor V. J. Gupta of Panjab University in northwestern India.4 However, most of Pickett and Talent’s collections (samples from about 20 different horizons along the highway 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #2 road cut) did not yield conodonts, nor for that matter other fossils, except for one sample. There were only three conodonts in the productive sample and Pickett asked if I could determine the age. One of the specimens appeared to be from the Silurian (the period before the Devonian; suggestive of the early part of the Silurian, about 435 440 Ma), although it was too poorly preserved for a confident identification. The main point is that the Australian paleontologists had not replicated the report by Professor Gupta of late Devonian conodonts from the Nepal road cut. John Pickett then showed me two papers by Gupta both published in 1975. I had not seen the paper on the Nepal road cut previously; the other described a strikingly similar Devonian conodont fauna from a site in the Kashmir Himalayas, about 600 kilometers to the west.5 Not only did the illustrations in the two papers indicate that the sites represented the same short interval of time within the late part of the Devonian, but I noticed that two of the photographs were of the same conodont specimens in each paper. Of course, this is impossible, unless it was due to an inadvertent mix up of photographs. At this point Willi Ziegler returned from giving a lecture, and Pickett and I related the curious matter of the duplication of photographs, and the identity of the two conodont faunas 600 kilometers apart. Also, the three of us were well aware that the conodonts Gupta had illustrated, said to be from the Himalayas, were exactly the same species as occur in a historically important fossil site south of Buffalo, New York. This was the earliest described conodont fauna from North America from a place called Eighteenmile Creek, discovered by George Jennings Hinde in 1879. When Professor Ziegler first began studying conodonts as a graduate student at Marburg during the early 1950s, he had been given a sample of abundant conodonts from Amsdell Creek, which is a short distance north of Eighteenmile Creek, and which contains the same thin layer of conodonts. The Amsdell Creek sample was donated to Ziegler by an amateur fossil collector, Raymond Hibbard, who lived in Buffalo and who had been “mining” the thin layer of conodonts from Amsdell Creek since the 1930s. Hibbard had found so many conodonts that during the 1950s he distributed small jars full of these microscopic teeth (normally each on the order of 1 mm in length, the size of sand grains) to all the established conodont researchers, as well as various paleontological laboratories around the world. The Amsdell Creek fauna is distinctive in three respects: 1) the special gray color of the conodonts is highly characteristic, and in addition there are associated fish fragments of an unusual orange color; 2) there is one prominent species endemic to the eastern U.S., and 3) there is an anomalous mixture of four different intervals of the Devonian timescale, based on conodonts, condensed into the one layer. Significantly, the conodonts illustrated by V. J. Gupta in 1975 include the one North American endemic species and evidence of the same mixture of time intervals – of course, the color could not be discerned from the black and white photographs in the publications. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #3 The point of this tangent about the nature of the Amsdell Creek conodonts is that as soon as Pickett and I mentioned the duplication of photographs in the two Gupta papers illustrating conodonts supposedly from the Himalayas, Ziegler immediately recalled a highly significant meeting. When Gupta visited Marburg on a Humboldt Foundation fellowship in 1972, he approached Ziegler with the proposition that they do a joint paper describing a conodont fauna he said was from the Himalayas. He brought the conodonts into Ziegler’s lab, but immediately on viewing the specimens Willi said: “Oh, you have conodonts from Amsdell Creek.” Of course he recognized this from the two distinctive colors, visible to the naked eye and akin to a fingerprint when combined with the other evidence. But Gupta assured him that the conodonts he brought to Marburg were from the Himalayas. Ziegler declined to participate in a joint paper, as he suspected something was not quite right. In the light of this earlier experience combined with evidence manifest in Gupta’s two 1975 papers, Ziegler and I decided that a brief statement should be inserted into our almost completed review paper. On returning to the U.S. in September, 1978 and beginning a research leave at Oregon State University in Corvallis, I attempted to draft a few carefully worded sentences that would express our skepticism about the geographic origin of the conodonts said to be from Nepal and Kashmir. Nonetheless, we could not conclusively prove that the conodonts illustrated by Gupta were from Amsdell Creek in New York without seeing the actual specimens, as it was possible that they were from the Himalayas. Consequently, the brief statement had to be qualified. As I was struggling to write this late one evening in the geology department at Corvallis, a famous colleague came up from his lair in the basement of the building, knocked on my door, and asked what the hell I was doing there so late. To Arthur J. Boucot I summarized the story I have just related. Art became extremely upset I had never seem him this way before and without a word rushed downstairs to his office. He returned some minutes later with a voluminous file folder. It contained several years of correspondence with none other than V. J. Gupta. The Panjab University paleontologist had sent to Oregon State University a collection of brachiopods (two shelled marine organisms superficially similar to clam shells but belonging to their own separate phylum of invertebrates), which he indicated were from the same locality and horizon as another group of fossils (graptolites) already published by Gupta and an American co author that gave an unequivocal correlation with the late Silurian (about 420 Ma). But Boucot was sure that the brachiopods were not Silurian (he is the world’s leading expert on Silurian brachiopods) but rather were from the late Ordovician (approximately 25 million years older). This was followed by an extensive exchange of correspondence, with Gupta insisting that the brachiopods and graptolites were from the same locality and horizon and Boucot insisting this was impossible because of the radical disparity in age. They reached an impasse with Boucot refusing to engage in a joint publication on the brachiopods, quite similar to Ziegler’s unwillingness to co author a paper with Gupta on the conodonts he had brought to Germany. Ziegler’s and my brief, qualified statement expressing 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #4 skepticism about the geographic origin of the Nepal and Kashmir conodonts was published in 1979, as three admittedly buried sentences in our review paper on Devonian conodonts.6 Although intended as a warning, it proved to have virtually no effect. In actuality, Ziegler, Boucot, and I had stumbled onto something already thoroughly investigated by the Australian paleontologist, John Talent. Initially, Talent had done field work in the 1970s in the Himalayas extending from northern Pakistan through India to Nepal, and had been unable to replicate any of the numerous Gupta fossil sites visited. Subsequently, after a study of Gupta’s many papers, John Talent spent a number of years building a carefully constructed, iron clad case to expose what proved to be a mountain of fraud, developed in over 400 papers published on Himalayan paleontology over a 25 year period starting in the 1960s.7 In brief, the methodology of the fraud took several forms, the major one involving reporting fossils collected from elsewhere in the world (often purchased from commercial dealers or stolen from teaching and museum collections in geological institutions) and claiming their origin to be from remote areas of the Himalayas. Typically, the papers were illustrated with generalized location maps so that replication was impeded, but where the sites could be located they contained either unfossiliferous rocks, fossils of undiagnostic character, or no exposure of rocks at all. Another method was to re publish the same fossils claiming them to be from geographically different sites (as in the conodont example mentioned at the outset) or copying illustrations taken from much earlier publications by other authors. Gupta, while acknowledging that he was not an expert on any particular group of fossils, characteristically brought in a considerable number of unsuspecting, internationally renowned experts to identify the fossils, write the detailed descriptions, and serve as co authors. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #5 The full details of the fraud were meticulously described in a series of papers by John Talent and associates in the late 1980s and 1990s,7 as well as at an international geological meeting in Calgary in 1987 where V. J. Gupta was confronted with the evidence gathered by Talent. The story was brought to the attention of the wider scientific public in a summary paper by Talent in the British weekly journal, Nature in 1989, followed by a report in the comparable American journal, Science, a day later.8 In a commentary by the editorship of Nature, the “Himalayan Hoax” was compared with the infamous Piltdown Forgery, oversimplifying the reference to that case.9 Before turning to the story of Piltdown, I conclude by noting that Gupta was unsuccessful in his attempt to refute the overwhelming evidence of fraud published by John Talent. Although Gupta was temporarily suspended in 1991 from his prominent academic position within Panjab University, he was inexplicably re instated a year later. In a vote of the faculty senate in 1993, only 5 of 55 senators voted for his dismissal.7a According to a recent personal communication from John Talent, Gupta continued to occupy a position in the geology department there until his retirement in 2004. There are a few similarities between the “Himalayan Hoax” and the Piltdown Forgery, yet there are especially crucial differences. The principal similarity is that fossils from elsewhere were claimed to be from a highly improbable, if not impossible, geologic and geographic location. The specimens alleged to be from a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex, England were not only “planted” there but represented forged orangutan and human remains. But the “Himalayan Hoax,” which was soon exposed and discounted, did not despite the voluminous number of publications have a comparable impact to that of the Piltdown Forgery. The latter deeply affected the history of research in paleoanthropology for decades. The initial Piltdown specimens were presented at a meeting of the Geological Society of London in 1912. They consisted of a number of cranial fragments and a partial right lower mandible (jawbone) with two molars preserved, but with the rest of the teeth and the front of the jaw not preserved. Significantly, the point of articulation of the lower jaw to the cranium was not preserved. The specimens had been collected by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist and archaeologist who lived near Piltdown and who was the steward for the manor house, Barkham Manor, on which the gravel pit was located. The cranium and jaw were described by Arthur Smith Woodward, a prominent paleontologist and Keeper of Geology at the British Museum of Natural History, who was a specialist in fossil fish and reptiles. Most of the leading paleoanthropologists in England were present at the meeting, and none raised doubts on the authenticity of the fossils. The prevailing view was that the jaw and cranial fragments belonged to the same species and individual, although there was opposition to this expressed by David Waterston, Professor of Anatomy at King’s College.10 But this issue was overshadowed by disagreement on the details of the reconstruction of the cranium. The species, named by Smith Woodward as 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #6 Eoanthropus dawsoni (the genus name meaning “Dawn Man” and the species named in honor of the collector), was viewed as representing an early hominid with a human like brain and an apelike jaw, thus taken to be a “missing link” between an ape ancestor and modern humans. Furthermore, associated mammalian fossils “found” at the same site (fossil Hippopotamus and Mastodon remains, among others; all these were “planted” as well) appeared to date the Piltdown fossils to the beginning of the Pleistocene (Ice Ages), now known to be about 2 million years before present. Despite Piltdown’s acceptance by the British anthropological establishment, there were early doubters in continental Europe and the U.S., as well as Waterston in England, who thought that the jaw could not possibly belong to the same species as the cranium, as they were so different. The skeptical view was that in effect a chimpanzee like jaw had been fortuitously found associated with a human like cranium in the Barkham Manor pit near Piltdown. The fact that the articulation of the lower jaw with the cranium was missing prevented a definitive test of the alternative hypothesis. But in 1915 a site (Piltdown II) two miles distant at Sheffield Park was “discovered” by Dawson and reported by Smith Woodward in 1917, again with some cranial fragments and an isolated molar identical with the initial finds. [The exact location of Piltdown II was not given in Smith Woodward’s publication.11 No Piltdown fossils were found after Dawson’s death in 1916]. This converted some, but by no means all of the doubters to the conclusion that a single species was involved. One of the skeptics was Gerrit S. Miller, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian Institution, who made a detailed study of casts of the Piltdown Barkham Manor specimens and published his first doubts in 1915. He concluded that the jaw was that of a new species of chimpanzee and that the cranium was that of the genus Homo. He therefore recommended that the name Eoanthropus be discarded and gave a new name for the supposed fossil chimpanzee (Pan vetus),12 based on the lower jaw alone. Nonetheless, Miller’s views were not accepted by the British anthropological establishment and in fact were severely attacked by a colleague of Smith Woodward’s at the British Museum, William Pycraft.13 In a paper in 1929, Miller wrote: “Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition and recovery in so breaking the Piltdown fossils and losing the most essential parts of the original skull as to allow free scope to individual judgement in fitting the pieces together . . . “14 In his review of the Piltdown forgery, Roger Lewin comments that “for Miller, this was merely a rhetorical observation, not a serious conjecture. But forty years later, it proved to be uncannily accurate.”15 Miller, it should be noted, did not have the opportunity to study the actual Piltdown specimens, only artificial casts. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #7 Besides Miller, another American skeptic was William King Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History who studied the material from the Barkham Manor site in 1913 and published his doubts the following year. Apparently giving voice to a rumor that was then circulating,16 Gregory wrote of the Piltdown specimens: “It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a Negro or Australian skull and a broken ape jaw, artificially fossilized and ‘planted’ in the gravel bed, to fool the scientists.”17 But Gregory did not question the authenticity of the specimens.17a In 1915, he was persuaded by Miller’s view that the jaw did not belong with the cranium, but when the Piltdown II site was announced Gregory reversed his opinion and supported Smith Woodward and others who held the prevailing view. Gregory’s early mention of a possible hoax seems to have been largely forgotten until relatively recently. That Eoanthropus dawsoni was based on a forgery was conclusively demonstrated in 1953 in a definitive study by Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Oakley, and W. E. Le Gros Clark.18 Fluorine dating of the cranial fragments by Oakley a few years earlier showed only slight antiquity, and the cranial fragments proved to be from a specimen of modern Homo sapiens (radiocarbon date of 620 + 100 years before present).19 The jaw was from a modern orangutan, not a fossil (estimated at 90 + 120 years before present and confirmed as an orangutan in 1982).20 Most of the remains had been chemically stained to appear old, to correspond to the color of the gravel in the Piltdown pit.20a And the molars of the lower jaw had been filed down so as not to appear apelike. The planes of the wear surfaces of the two molars, however, were set at a distinct angle to each other and the file marks were plainly visible in microscopes of the 1950s. With the benefit of hindsight, one would think that these features could have been observed with careful study of the jaw in 1912. However, most of the early focus was on differing reconstructions of the cranium. Note that in this brief summary I have had to omit mention of a number of details, which together make the reality of the forgery even more obvious to us now. Since the exposure of the forgery in 1953 there has been an unending quest for the identity of the forger (or forgers). On a website that was last updated in the late 1990s over 400 papers were listed on this question.21 The majority opinion is that Charles Dawson must have been involved but the remaining question is: was he part of a conspiracy? Nearly every prominent scientist involved with the Piltdown specimens in England at that time, has been fingered as a co conspirator of Dawson’s. Also, and most remarkably, the seemingly innocent bystander, Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown and was shown the gravel pit by Dawson, has been alleged to have been the sole perpetrator. But the simplest explanation is that Charles Dawson acted alone. The “whodunnit” may never be solved, however, as there remains only inconclusive circumstantial evidence. But along with others, I would argue that the identity of the culprit (or culprits) is an unimportant side issue that has diverted us 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #8 since 1953 from the important question. As Michael Hammond has written: “Since its unmasking in the early 1950s, attempts to discover ‘whodunnit’ in this mystery have somewhat obscured a far more important question in the history of anthropology, namely, what could have led so many eminent scientists to embrace such a forgery?”22 To address this question, one has to consider the prevailing knowledge as well as the preconceived theories of the leading British paleoanthropologists in the years from 1900 to 1915. Before the publication of the Piltdown specimens, very few hominid fossils were known, essentially only three species. Neanderthal was first recognized from fragmentary remains in Germany in 1856 and was known from other specimens such as those from Gibraltar and Spy, Belgium also found in the 1800s. The most complete skeleton of Neanderthal before 1912 was discovered at La Chapelle aux Saints in southwestern France in 1908, and was described by Marcelline Boule of the Museum of Natural History in Paris in a series of monographs from 1911 1913. Through his reconstruction, now known to have been “based upon an incorrect analysis of the spinal column and limb bones, Boule denied the Neanderthals a fully upright posture and fabricated the archetype of the slouching cave brute. This created an enormous morphological gulf between the Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. Since it was thought at this time that the temporal gap between these two populations was relatively small, there simply was not enough time for the evolutionary transformation of such a morphologically primitive population as the Neanderthals . .”23 into the succeeding Cro Magnon populations, which are anatomically identical with modern Homo sapiens. “And Boule was dead set against viewing the Neanderthals as anything but an offshoot of the human lineage that had died out without issue. Anatomically, Boule claimed, the Neanderthals had possessed divergent big toes (hence grasping feet, on which, moreover, weight was borne, apelike, on the outer edges) . . .”24 But Boule ignored evidence from another site in France that demonstrated Neanderthals did not possess divergent big toes.25 Thus, Boule’s views, which strongly influenced his British colleagues, excluded Neanderthals from any close evolutionary relationship with Homo sapiens and this was the prevailing view of the chief proponents of Piltdown.26 Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus, “Java Man”) was discovered at Trinil in Java by Eugene Dubois in 1891 92, consisting of a skullcap and a femur. The femur was like that of modern humans though pathologically altered, whereas the cranial cap was smaller than that of Neanderthals but with similar heavy brow ridges above the eyes.27 In his publication of 1894 Dubois considered Pithecanthropus erectus to represent an evolutionary transition between apes and modern humans. But by 1912, this view was not accepted by most paleoanthropologists, and the species was not seriously considered again until the 1930s when far more specimens were found in Java, and following discoveries in the late 1920s – early 1930s of the Peking (Beijing) specimens now known to belong to the same species. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #9 The third species known before the Piltdown forgery appeared on the scene, was based on the lower jaw found in 1908 in a quarry at Mauer near Heidelberg and named Homo heidelbergensis. No other hominid remains were subsequently found at the site. The age was thought to be from an interval of the Pleistocene older than Neanderthal. But although this species is now considered important in hominid evolution because of later discovered specimens from elsewhere that are now included within the species,28 Homo heidelbergensis had little or no impact on the Piltdown question. In addition to the paucity of hard evidence from the fossil record prior to 1912, as well as the perhaps understandable misinterpretations of what was available, there were the preconceived theories of hominid evolution held by the leading British paleoanthropologists.29 Two of the more prominent figures will be mentioned as examples. Arthur Keith, anatomist and anthropologist at the Royal College of Surgeons, was responsible for a reconstruction of the Piltdown cranium following the initial attempt by Smith Woodward. Keith believed in a great antiquity for the origin of modern humans. A year before the unveiling of Piltdown he was on record as believing in the existence of a morphologically modern hominid living prior to the Neanderthals,30 without fossil evidence for support. Thus, Keith was susceptible to acceptance of the authenticity of the Piltdown fragments. Whereas the earlier reconstruction underestimated the size of the cranium, that of Keith’s was much larger and “lacked the primitive features erroneously present in Smith Woodward’s.”31 Keith’s cranial reconstruction was essentially modern in morphology.32 Differences in the reconstructions were to be expected since so much of the cranium was missing.33 But it is not unreasonable to suppose that Keith’s reconstruction was partly driven by his belief in the great antiquity of a modern like hominid ancestor. The cranium of Piltdown appeared to support this hypothesis [remember that it is from a modern Homo sapiens and therefore Keith’s reconstruction was essentially correct]. But to accept the authenticity of Piltdown, Keith would have had to ignore the evidence of the lower jaw, including the isolated apelike canine found by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in company with Dawson and Smith Woodward at the Barkham Manor site in 1913.34 The third reconstruction of the Piltdown cranium was by Grafton Elliot Smith, a prominent neuroanatomist and Professor of Anatomy at Manchester University and later University College, London. Elliot Smith’s reconstruction represented a compromise between the previous reconstructions in terms of size, but still it was that of a relatively large brain. Despite the size of the cranium, Elliot Smith thought that it showed apelike characters, but that the apelike character of the lower jaw had been exaggerated.35 Elliot Smith was deeply committed to the hypothesis that the large brain appeared first in the course of hominid evolution before the advent of the ability to 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #10 walk upright (bipedalism), and he had held this view prior to the unveiling of Piltdown in 1912. Like some other anthropologists of this period (before the discoveries in Africa of Australopithecus, which demonstrate that bipedalism and evolution of a human like lower jaw preceded the development of a large brain), Elliot Smith was engaged in a type of narrative analogous in structure to that of classic folk tales (Landau29). Suffice it to say, the paleoanthropological narratives of that period were supported only by the most limited and fragmentary evidence from fossils. It may be tempting now to disparage the Piltdown forgery as unimportant, but it had a profound effect on the acceptance or more accurately the lack of acceptance of some of the legitimate hominid fossils discovered after World War I. The commitment to Piltdown as authentic impeded the acceptance of the initial discovery of Australopithecus by Raymond Dart in 1925. The strong advocates of the authenticity of Piltdown, Smith Woodward and Keith, rejected the early finds of Australopithecus, a hominid which possessed a small brain with a human like jaw, the opposite of Piltdown. To derive a moral from the uncritical acceptance of the Piltdown Forgery by the authors of the prevailing view, one might well consider the philosophical discussion given by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in their seminal paper on punctuated evolution. “Theory does not develop as a simple and logical extension of observation; it does not arise merely from the patient accumulation of facts. Rather, we observe in order to test hypotheses and examine the consequences. Thus, Hanson (1970, p. 22 23) writes: ‘Much recent philosophy of science has been dedicated to disclosing that a ‘given’ or a ‘pure’ observation language is a myth eaten fabric of philosophical fiction . . . In any observation statement the cloven hoofprint of theory can be readily detected.’ “36 Are the “Himalayan Hoax” and the Piltdown Forgery isolated cases of aberrant behavior in the sciences? Or, are they mere instances among a multitude within “a culture of fraud,” the first chapter title in the powerful new book “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” by Horace Freeland Judson? Let Judson have the last word. “Day upon day, week upon week, the cases multiply, in social institutions of the most varied kinds – in finance and industry, or in the professions, or in the churches, or in sports, the media, the sciences. We can no longer suppose these are isolated instances within largely self governing, self correcting systems. We can no longer escape considering the shapes and contexts of fraud.” 37 REFERENCES CITED 1. Gould, S. J., 1980, Piltdown Revisited, in The Pandas’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History: W. W. Norton, p. 108. 2. Gould, S. J., 1983, The Piltdown Conspiracy, p. 201 226, in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History: W. W. Norton, p. 202. 3. Keen, A. M., 1977, Paleontological Hoaxes: Natural History, vol. 86, no. 5, p. 24, 26, 30. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #11 4. Gupta, V. J., 1975, Upper Devonian Conodonts from Phulchauki, Nepal: Himalayan Geology, vol. 5, p. 153 168. 5. Gupta, V. J., 1975, Devonian Conodonts from Himalaya: Chayanica Geology, vol. 1, p. 99 121. 6. Klapper, G., and Ziegler, W., 1979, Devonian Conodont Biostratigraphy: Special Papers in Palaeontology, no. 23, p. 220. 7. Talent, J. A., Goel, R. K., Jain, A. K., and Pickett, J. W., 1988, Silurian and Devonian of India, Nepal and Butan: Biostratigraphic and Palaeobiogeographic Anomalies: Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, vol. 106, 57 p. Talent, J. A., Brock, G. A., Engelbretsen, M. J., Kato, M., Morante, R., and Talent, R. C., 1989, Himalayan Paleontologic Database Polluted by Recycling and Other Anomalies: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 34, p. 575 586. Talent, J. A., Brock, G. A., Engelbretsen, M. J., Gaetani, M., Jell, P. A., Mawson, R., Talent, R. C., and Webster, G. D., 1990, Himalayan Palaeontologic Database Polluted: Plagiarism and Other Anomalies: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 35, p. 569 585. Wyatt, A. R., 1990, V. J. Gupta and the Aberystwyth Fossil Collections: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 35, p. 587 592. Webster, G. D., Rexroad, C. B., and Talent, J. A., 1993, An Evaluation of the V. J. Gupta Conodont Papers: Journal of Paleontology, vol. 67, p. 486 493. Talent, J. A., 1995, Chaos with Conodonts and other Fossil Biota: V. J. Gupta’s Career in Academic Fraud: Bibliographies and a short Biography: Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, vol. 182, p. 523 551 [Note: the first and last of these references represent the most comprehensive accounts of the fraud]. 7a: Talent, 1995, p. 528 529. 8. Talent, J. A., 1989, The Case of the Peripatetic Fossils: Nature, vol. 338, p. 613 615. Lewin, R., 1989, The Case of the “Misplaced” Fossils: Science, vol. 244, p. 277 279. 9. Nature, 1989, Himalayan Hoax: Nature, vol. 338, p. 604. 10. Weiner, J. S., 1955, The Piltdown Forgery: Oxford University Press [1980 reprint, Dover Publications], p. 7. 11. Drawhorn, G. M., 1994, Piltdown: Evidence of Smith Woodward’s complicity, p. 5 6: http://home.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/drawhorn.html 12. Spencer, F., 1990, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery: Oxford University Press, p. 100. 13. As 12, p. 102 104. 14. Quoted in 12, p. 114 115. 15. Lewin, R., 1988, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins: Simon and Schuster, p. 75. 16. Spencer, F., 1988, Prologue to a Scientific Forgery, in Stocking, G. W., Jr. (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 105. 17. Gregory, W. K., 1914, The Dawn Man of Piltdown, England: The American Museum Journal, vol. 14, p. 190. Also quoted in Thomson, K. S., 1993, Piltdown Man, the Great English Mystery Story, in The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays: Yale University Press, p. 86. 17a: “None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and the gravel pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the discovery,” Gregory, 1914, p. 191. 18. As 10, p. 34. 19. As 12, p. 229 230, footnote 30. 20. As 12, p. 230, footnotes 30, 55. 20a: Stringer, C., 2003, Piltdown 2003: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/piltdown2003.html 21. Turrittin, T., 1997, A Piltdown Man Bibliography: http://home.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/bibliog.html 22. Hammond, M., 1979, A Framework of Plausibility for an Anthropological Forgery: The Piltdown Case: Anthropology, vol. 3, p. 47. [See also Broad, W. and Wade, N., 1982, Betrayers of the Truth: Simon and Schuster, p. 121: “Indeed, the real mystery is not who did it but how a whole generation of scientists could have been taken in by so transparent a prank.”] 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #12 23. As 22, p. 49 50. 24. Tattersall, I., 1995, The Fossil Trail: How we know what we think we know about human evolution: Oxford University Press, p. 45. 25. Jordan, P. 1999, Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins: Sutton Publishing, p. 31. 26. As 22, p. 50 51. 27. As 24, p. 35 36. 28. As 24, p. 47, 232, 234. 29. These have been analyzed by a number of scholars, including Michael Hammond (1979), Misia Landau, 1984, Human Evolution as Narrative: American Scientist, vol. 72, p. 262 267; 1991, Narratives of Human Evolution: Yale University Press; Bowler, P. J., 1986, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844 1944: Johns Hopkins University Press, and Roger Lewin (1988). 30. As 22, p. 51. 31. As 15, p. 74. 32. As 22, p. 52; see comparison of the two reconstructions in 12, p. 64. 33. As 24, p. 48 49. 34. As 12, p. 69; 24, p. 49. For a more thorough analysis of Keith’s preconceived views, see Bowler, P. J., 1986, p. 91 95. 35. As 15, p. 74. 36. Eldredge, N., and Gould, S. J., 1972, Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism, in Schopf, T. J. M. (ed.), Models in Paleobiology: Freeman, Cooper and Company, p. 85. 37. Judson, H. F., 2004, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science: Harcourt, p. 9.

[Infamous VJ Gupta case]
http://www.geocities.com/w_d_west/
[W.D.West is accused of plagiarising Joseph G Medlicott, with a gap of 100 years between the
publications; the Geocities cite remains anonymous]

Plagiarsim in Kerala Science Congress

http://knowventure.blogspot.com/
[GRC Reddy, the current director (March 2008) of NIT Calicut (NITC, formerly REC-Calicut) is accused of plagiarsim in his valedictory address at the 2007 Kerala Science Congress. The anonymous blog lays it thick and fast, and Reddy can't possibly outmanouvre this]

Blogs and articles discussing plagiarism in India

http://mogadalai.wordpress.com/tag/plagiarism/

http://www.famousplagiarists.com/scienceandmedicine.htm

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/mar102008/581.pdf
An article in the March 10, 2008 issue of Current Science (India) on plagiarism by one of its long-time editors, K. R. Rao

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Plagiarism. III

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Plagiarism: Refuge of the imbecile

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