With the right-wing propaganda machine making all these claims about how climate scientists lie, yada blah, it struck me: they wouldn't know actual lying scientists if they saw them. Being in organic chemistry, and it being a fairly small community, the entire community has seen a few scattered examples of actual lying scientists, and I thought I'd share.
I expect that scientists in other fields have seen their own examples of lying scientists that are stories that are well-known within their own fields but completely unknown outside of the field, and I'd be interested to hear those stories, too.
First, let's start with the amazing 33 step synthesis of a molecule by one researcher. He claimed to have made a gram (which is a HUGE amount for a 33 step synthesis), but he couldn't share any of the material because the US Government had prohibited him from disclosing it. But, that was just the tip of the iceberg. He thanked six techs from the "Bionic Brothers", or something similar (this led to tons of "nintendo" jokes), for help making it. His paper attracted a lot of attention for these claims, and then the observation by another professor that in all likelihood the structure he claimed to have made was not the structure of the natural product. This was proven out by another professor then making the molecule in 6 steps from something he'd made previously...and the second professor was right. The first researcher is amazingly still out there publishing, but his reputation has been sullied forever.
This second example isn't as much a "lie" as it is incompetence and a fairly poor job of peer review. One of the top journals in my field put a paper online (which means it's passed through at least one editor and two reviewers) claiming to have discovered a new role for a very old chemical. Needless to say, this attracted a lot of attention, almost all of which can be summed up with "bullshit". At least one or two bloggers immediately set out to test the reaction, which to their surprise worked - but they figured out that you needed to be a sloppy chemist to make it work. Then other chemists started searching and discovered that it was actually a very old reaction, once you took into account the oxygen that the chemists had introduced by being sloppy. The paper was later retracted "due to scientific reasons", which is harsh in "science talk".
Example three is from a few years back now, and in a way has a happy ending, in that the person who was at fault ended up being "outed" and her boss ended up surviving. To go back to the beginning, a prof had a series of papers on a hot topic which showed these great results. However, a couple members of her lab were fired when they couldn't reproduce the results, but then whispers started coming in that other profs could reproduce the results either. So, the prof had a new postdoc he trusts check all of the results and carefully check the data. Turns out, the girl was buying the products of the reactions, running the tests late at night when no one was watching, and photoshopping the rest of the data that she needed (a helpful interview in cracking this case was talking to the custodial staff, who revealed she used to start running stuff at midnight. Moral of the story: never underestimate the custodial staff - they can be your best friend or your worst enemy). After this was discovered, the relevant papers (I think about 7) were retracted, and the girl fled the country in scientific shame. Her boss has not only survived but, after a brief rough patch, seems to be thriving again, which in a way is good to see, since he was being duped too.
On the first and last case I've withheld names / links, though anyone else in Orgo will know who I'm talking about. Call it some sort of weird privacy thing :p.
The big point I want to show here is that when it comes to calling "bullshit", scientists are perfectly willing to do so. And anyone who's seen scientists interact knows that it can be a really harsh interaction, even when there's mutual respect. So, for all of those skeptics who are crowing about how climate scientists are liars, I'd suggest they check into some of these real scandals, and see what real lying in science is.
I'd be interested to hear others examples of stuff from their fields. I know the stem cell scandal from South Korea, and the Alabama-Birmingham crystallographer, but I don't know of others.