Well Meaning Cheating

Over at The Chem Blog, there have been a series of posts dealing with cheating in science. As this has been discussed in many forums over the years, I really don’t have much to add other than mentioning that there is one aspect which is rarely discussed – the well-intentioned falsification of your data by someone else. Back in grad school, I was determining a reaction mechanism using labeled ⁹⁵Mo. After conversion of the various Mo products into MoO₄^2-, it was easy to measure the isotopic enrichment using ⁹⁵Mo NMR. To test out the technique, I prepared a sample of ⁹⁵MoO₄^2- and gave it to the NMR guy for analysis. The resulting spectrum was beautiful! A nice symmetrical peak with very little noise. Of course, since I wanted to run a fair number of samples (each sample required 2.5 hours) and since the NMR guy was busy, I soon realized I would have to run them myself if I planned on finishing my degree before my advisor retired. So I learned how to run the instrument and eventually analyzed the sample again for practice. The spectrum looked something like this.
(OK, so I added the boat, but you get the idea. The little stick in the water was the Mo signal)

WTF?! How did I screw this up so badly? I asked other grad students for help. I repeated the analysis with another sample. I tried everything I could think of in my rather limited repertoire of NMR tricks. Nothing I tried made the spectrum look any better. Finally I located the NMR guy who had done the original analysis and asked him what he had done to get such a good spectrum. It took me a little while to figure it out, but I eventually realized that he had prettied up the spectrum a little before giving it to me. Looking back at the original data, his original spectrum had looked a lot like mine, but then he had MANUALLY ZEROED OUT THE ROLLING BASELINE, POINT BY POINT, until I had a nice sharp peak with zero noise. Then he had blown up the spectrum until the small blip looked like a giant Gaussian peak. Needless to say, I never let him run a sample for me again.

Of course, it never occurred to him that he was cheating or manipulating the data. He just figured he was doing me a favor. The moral is: If you depend upon someone else collecting data for you, make sure you always see the raw data.