“Everybody’s doing it,” is the perennial excuse used by somebody who knows that what they are doing is inexcusable.
From an article, Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research by Jeffrey R. Young:
Experts say that many young researchers may not even realize that tampering with their images is inappropriate. After all, people now commonly alter digital snapshots to take red out of eyes, so why not clean up a protein image in Photoshop to make it clearer?
Ms. Roovers admitted that she used the software, though she says she was not the only one in the lab to do so.
“I certainly did something wrong, but I don’t think I was alone in the whole thing,” she says, adding that it was not her intent to deceive. “It was trying to present it even better.”
I found this article via a posting on BoingBoing. The comments to that posting, many by people who have witnessed similar cheating in the scientific community, are depressing.
I already talked about the use of image manipulation to produce fake scientific evidence in my February 2 posting, Good Reasons to Hate Manipulated Photographs, but I didn’t realize it was as common as this article and the BoingBoing responses suggest.
Note that this kind of thing in no way justifies claims that manipulated images and Photoshop cause deception and fakery — any more than free speech caused Nazism.
-Julie
