Academic fraud: The biology lab and the French paper

The long view of security strategies for your network.

After I sent in the last two articles about papers-for-purchase, I remembered a couple of stories that might amuse readers even though they are far from the normal course of discussion of network and enterprise security. Consider these two simply as amusing stories of fraudsters caught in their own lies and as a little break from the serious stuff I usually write about.

The first case occurred when I was a graduate student working in the laboratory of a distinguished scientist. There were always several graduate students under his direction working on doctoral thesis research, and one of them who arrived a couple of years into my time there was a very nice fellow whom I will call Hank (of course I'm masking all the details). Hank and his wife were lovely people and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them. They were honest, hard-working mid-westerners and my wife and I liked their sense of humor and their friendly openness.

Hank did excellent work on his research project and was known for his neatness and lack of clutter. We had a lot of glassware in our lab, and the nature of the little fresh-water invertebrates we worked on were very sensitive to contaminants, so we would do mind-numbing routines like washing the glassware in non-ionic detergent, rinsing everything 10 times in hot tap water, rinsing it 10 times in distilled water and finally rinsing it 10 times in double-distilled water (this is where I learned Monty Python by heart – I used to listen to tapes of the British comedians while spending hours on the glassware). Hank was famous for never once breaking anything and for always having his equipment perfectly racked after his experiments.

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After I sent in the last two articles about papers-for-purchase, I remembered a couple of stories that might amuse readers even though they are far from the normal course of discussion of network and enterprise security. Consider these two simply as amusing stories of fraudsters caught in their own lies and as a little break from the serious stuff I usually write about.

The first case occurred when I was a graduate student working in the laboratory of a distinguished scientist. There were always several graduate students under his direction working on doctoral thesis research, and one of them who arrived a couple of years into my time there was a very nice fellow whom I will call Hank (of course I'm masking all the details). Hank and his wife were lovely people and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them. They were honest, hard-working mid-westerners and my wife and I liked their sense of humor and their friendly openness.

Hank did excellent work on his research project and was known for his neatness and lack of clutter. We had a lot of glassware in our lab, and the nature of the little fresh-water invertebrates we worked on were very sensitive to contaminants, so we would do mind-numbing routines like washing the glassware in non-ionic detergent, rinsing everything 10 times in hot tap water, rinsing it 10 times in distilled water and finally rinsing it 10 times in double-distilled water (this is where I learned Monty Python by heart – I used to listen to tapes of the British comedians while spending hours on the glassware). Hank was famous for never once breaking anything and for always having his equipment perfectly racked after his experiments.

Yep, neat and tidy: it became evident to our professor that the reason everything was neat and tidy was that Hank was not actually performing any experiments at all. He was making up all the results without the bother of doing the work. He was thrown out of graduate school in disgrace and his wife divorced him shortly thereafter.

Incidentally, if you ever have any questions about the validity of numerical data (such as accounting results or quality-control data), there are well-established techniques for identifying made-up or extensively modified data. Forensic accounting techniques, which can be applied to experimental data as well, include such techniques as verifying that the digits in the data are randomly distributed (for example using goodness of fit tests) and tests of independence in the numerical sequences (Markov chaining tests).

* * *

The second incident occurred when I was teaching in my native language at a French-language university in 1978-1979. One day I received a term paper from a student and burst into laughter when I turned the page from the cover page to the second page. I showed the paper to my chairman and he laughed immediately too. So we called the student in for questioning (remember, this is all in French – which will become significant shortly).

Trying as best we could to keep straight faces, we asked him if he had written the paper. Oh yes, he said, he had written it. "Every word?" we asked. "Yes indeed!" he answered.

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services and teaching. He is Chief Technical Officer of Adaptive Cyber Security Instruments, Inc. and Associate Professor of Information Assurance in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University. Visit his Web site for white papers and course materials.