TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

In recent years, the number of retracted scientific papers has escalated, mostly due to data fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct is, quite rightly, universally condemned, its motivations may reflect pressures on scientists to fulfil the societal expectations. This presentation reimagines scientific fraud as a form of speculative literature, written by scientists for scientists through data. Like science fiction, fabricated data create an alternative reality, where diseases are curable, aging can be stopped, physical laws are bent. Indeed, most fabricated studies are in areas that are in most desperate need of breakthroughs. Thus, scientific fraud can serve as a mirror that reflects the direction of future scientific progress by indicating where human ambitions are most intently focused. This same portrayal of humanity’s yearning for miracles, along with protagonists’ frustrated dreams, echoes in classical art and drama, where the tension between hope and reality creates powerful narratives. Viewed this way, scientific fraud can be reread as an art form - a narrative that reshapes reality through meticulous storytelling. It also evokes folklore and mythology, where the bending of reality reflects a desire to alter the world through supernatural, often forbidden, means. This perspective on scientific misconduct enriches our understanding of the scientific process, shedding light on the complex interplay of aspiration, creativity, and power. Through analysing scientific deceptions, we can dissect the motivations behind the pursuit of knowledge, an endeavour intrinsically shrouded by uncertainties, errors, biases and mismanagement. Liars are not artists, but their falsified reports are narratives that speak to our expectations of science’s potential, provoking and unsettling us with uncomfortable truths about its aspirations and limitations, qualities that align them, inadvertently, to artworks.