Seth told me once about a nutrition researcher, Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, whose work Seth and a colleague read about a few years ago and realized was fradulent. There was some controversy at the time, but in retrospect the pattern of fraud was clear. Here’s the transcript of a recent Canadian Broadcasting Company broadcast on the case (the doctor was based at a hospital in Newfoundland). Here’s the basic story (from the broadcast):

Nestle had hired Chandra to scientifically test their product, but as the pressure on the company mounted in late 1988, Chandra was just in the early stages of conducting that study.

By the following summer, Harvey [his research nurse] had recruited only a handful of subjects, so she was shocked when she came across the already published results of the Nestle study.

“I would say there was only probably one-quarter of the patients even recruited in this study,” Harvey says. “And he had all of the data analyzed and published even before we had even had the data collected!”
. . .
The university put together an independent panel [in 1994] to investigate the allegations against Chandra. . . . “With respect to the allegations, the Committee is, therefore led to conclude that scientific misconduct has been committed by Dr. Chandra.”

Despite the committee’s conclusion, the university decided not to take any action against Chandra.

Jack Strawbridge, Memorial University Director of Faculty Relations, says the investigation was dropped because Chandra accused the committee of bias and threatened to sue.
. . .
While the investigation against Chandra had been going on, the editors of one medical journal, the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, had been hanging onto a study he’d submitted for publication. But when the journal was told by Memorial that there was insufficent evidence to proceed, they went ahead and published his five year followup on the Nestle milk study … a followup on a study that had never been done in the first place.
. . .
Or his best-known study published in the Lancet in 1992… We tried to reach the people thanked. None of the people we could reach recalled working on the study.
. . .
According to Berkeley Prof. Seth Roberts, there are other reasons to be suspicious about this one.

“There are statistical impossibilities in the Lancet paper and there’s mistakes, there are inconsistencies between the graphs and the text. And there’s this claim that everybody approached agreed to be in the study. That’s just not possible,” Roberts says.
. . .
The September 2001 issue [of the journal Nutrition] carried Chandra’s study, which claimed his patented multivitamin could dramatically improve the memory of seniors.

The improvements were so amazing they caught the attention of the New York Times, and that, ironically, was bad news for Chandra. Psychology Prof. Saul Sternberg from the University of Pennsylvania read about Chandra’s remarkable results, and he called his friend, Roberts of Berkeley. Both professors found the results too good to be true.

“Forever and ever people would be taking these vitamin, multivitamin supplements after they got to age 65, cause it, it was incredible what he found,” Roberts says. “It would change everyone’s life, you know millions and billions of people’s lives, if it was true. And yet here it was in just an average journal. What’s that about?”
. . .
The two professors found many more glaring errors in Chandra’s study.

Was there any possible explanation for the errors found in the study?

“Oh yes,” Roberts says. “There’s a very possible explanation. It’s that he made it up.”