If John Carlisle had a cat flap, scientific fraudsters might rest easier at night. Carlisle routinely rises at 4.30 a.m. to let out Wizard, the family pet. Then, unable to sleep, he reaches for his laptop and starts typing up data from published papers on clinical trials. Before his wife’s alarm clock sounds 90 minutes later, he has usually managed to fill a spreadsheet with the ages, weights and heights of hundreds of people — some of whom, he suspects, never actually existed.
By day, Carlisle is an anaesthetist working for England’s National Health Service in the seaside town of Torquay. But in his spare time, he roots around the scientific record for suspect data in clinical research. Over the past decade, his sleuthing has included trials used to investigate a wide range of health issues, from the benefits of specific diets to guidelines for hospital treatment. It has led to hundreds of papers being retracted and corrected, because of both misconduct and mistakes. And it has helped to end the careers of some large-scale fakers: of the six scientists worldwide
with the most retractions, three were brought down using variants of Carlisle’s data analyses.
