THIS COLUMN could probably benefit occasionally from a dollop of fraud. Not wholesale plagiarism or fabrication, more an artful adjustment of the actualité.

I could, for example, pretend that when I bumped into Floella Benjamin (true), I engaged her in earnest conversation about the ethics of stem-cell research (false), rather than gushing that she looked no older than when I first saw her on Play School and thus prompting her to depart swiftly for the buffet (sadly true). Both Floella and I would benefit from the deception — you could marvel at Floella’s intellectual depths while remaining ignorant of my social incompetence.

Fraud may also be good for science, according to Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Since most scientific duplicity involves researchers “idealising” results that they probably would eventually have achieved anyway, such fact-fiddling actually oils the wheels of discovery. He even questions whether it should be labelled fraud at all.

Fuller, unsurprisingly, is a voice of dissent in a discussion of whether the race to publish encourages scientists to perpetrate fraud. The discussion appears in Science & Public Affairs, the quarterly magazine of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He does, though, make an exception for drug studies, where misreporting could cause physical harm.

Another contributor, Dr Philip Campbell, the editor of Nature, insists that the pressure to publish is no excuse for unethical behaviour.

Fuller offers a blunt assessment of Campbell’s view: “It’s bullshit. It’s not a case of a few bad eggs. I think most fraud goes undetected. And if it was detected, the pace of science would probably slow down.” Indeed, a recent survey by Nature found that a third of postdocs in the US admitted to research misconduct.

What matters, Fuller insists, is whether the research turns out to be any good, and whether it spurs other discoveries: “The validity of a work is proven by its consequences. If enough people get good results out of what you’ve done, then that you derived your results under false circumstances doesn’t matter.”

Science is, however, increasingly puritanical about its more creative practitioners. Witness the spectacular downfall of Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean professor who claimed, falsely, to have cloned a human embryo and extracted stem cells from it. Once a national hero with his likeness on commemorative stamps, Hwang has been indicted for the misuse of public funds and breaking bioethics laws.

Yet, Fuller says, his impression is that other stem-cell researchers found Hwang-gate tragic and felt sympathy for its protagonist. “Hwang jumped the gun,” Fuller says. “The feeling is that someone else is going to come up with the same work in about a year’s time, only more correctly.” I find this statement at once both encouraging and dispiriting.

• A MATE calls up to tell me he will be out of a job because Reading University is to close its physics department. Closures of science departments are an old story but this is my mate. And this is Reading University, home to a world-class meteorology department that has been one of the single biggest contributors to our understanding of climate change. This is the Reading University that, just two years ago, was named as a co-host of the UK’s only centre of excellence for physics teaching and learning. No wonder its students are in revolt.

  The Institute of Physics calls the proposed closure “precipitous and ill-judged”. Its science director, Dr Peter Main, laments: “University vice-chancellors are operating in an environment that is controlled by the choices of seventeen-year old students. Funding follows student numbers and so the future of Britain’s science base rests on the university choices of sixth-formers.”

  And, as we all know, 17-year-olds make terrific long-term decisions, the kind that are sure to equip them to compete against hard-working, multilingual technogeniuses from Beijing and Bangalore. Such superior decision-making led, for the first time last summer, to more teenagers taking an A-level in media studies (28,281) than in physics (28,119).

  When Britain winds up as the call centre of the Universe, at least we’ll be able to read about it.

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