Observers blamed laxity on the part of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, which accepted Pearce's pioneering report on ectopic pregnancy after considering it for fully three days. Pearce benefited from an old- boy network. He was an editor of the duped journal. His mentor and supervisor at the hospital, Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain, was the journal's top editor and president of its publisher, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Just on the face of it, the 191- patient trial for miscarriages associated with polycystic ovaries should have raised questions.
Critics warn that fraud is distressingly common in medicine.
In 1996, five articles on leukemia co- authored by none other than Francis Collins, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, were withdrawn after a graduate student at the University of Michigan was found to have cooked up data.