Professional standards are not a substitute for the more necessary Trust.

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 53.

Few episodes of scientific fraud have effects on people’s lives that are as chillingly direct as the case of the artificial tracheas. Few scientific fraudsters are as outrageous and flamboyant as Macchiarini. Yet there are some wider lessons to learn from his story. The first is how much of science, despite its built-in organised scepticism, comes down to trust: trust that the studies really occurred as reported, that the numbers really are what came out of the statistical analysis, and, in this case, that the patients really did recover in the way that was claimed. Fraud shows just how badly that trust can be exploited. The second lesson is that the same scepticism we level at studies and at people also needs to be levelled at institutions. There will always be blackguards whose craving for fame and success overrides all other concerns, but we should be able to trust famed scientific institutions like the Karolinska Institute and the Lancet to do their utmost to prevent them from having an effect on science – and to expose and punish them whenever they arise. Alas, the reputation-motivated desire of these institutions to employ and publish glamorous scientists can result in a wilful blindness to the activities of fraudsters, and sometimes even extends to shielding them from the consequences of their actions.

We can go even further. The fact that the scientific community so proudly cherishes an image of itself as objective and scrupulously honest – a system where fraud is complete anathema – might, perversely, be what prevents it from spotting the bad actors in its midst. The very idea of villains like Macchiarini existing in science is so abhorrent that many adopt a see-no-evil attitude, overlooking even the most glaring signs of scientific misconduct. Others are in denial about the prevalence and the effects of fraud. But as we’ll see in this chapter, fraud in science is not the vanishingly rare scenario that we desperately hope it to be. In fact, it’s a distressingly common one.