ABSTRACT
In a profession that places an unusual premium on honesty, the emergence of fraud has created something of a stir. Scientific societies are holding symposia on the subject. A radical view of the ubiquity of fraud comes from philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, who holds that small-scale cheating is essential to the advancement of science. Just as there was no scientific or institutional mechanism to detect or deal with fraud in the Straus affair, neither was there a federal mechanism. More fundamentally, science was said to be self-correcting. If an experiment was important enough, other scientists would try to repeat it. Dubbed "organized skepticism," this view was originally set forth by Robert K. Merton, the father of the sociology of science. Thomas S. Kuhn divides the history of science into periods of normal and revolutionary activity, arguing that during normal periods, anomalies observed by the scientist must be suppressed or ignored.
