Sniffing out cheats

Last week's launch of The Science Book was marked by a question from the audience to astronomer royal Sir Martin Rees about the prevalence of fraud in science. Sir Martin insisted that cheating would always be caught in mathematical subjects like his own but that "data enrichment" was practised in other fields such as "studies of baboons sniffing each other's bottoms". The researcher in the audience who had published scientific papers on this subject was surprisingly polite in response.