"...most of the department knew he'd been cooking his data for years." This is the depressing part of it. Systemic corruption and people turning a blind eye. I

"...most of the department knew he'd been cooking his data for years." This is the depressing part of it. Systemic corruption and people turning a blind eye. If one's just a cog in the system and not the top brass it's much easier to ignore the problem and plod on regardless. If it's too much for one's conscience and one turns whistleblower one's status within the organization usually changes and one is usually perceived to be a 'leper' by coworkers - even by those who are not engaged in any nefarious activity. In effect, the whole organization coalesces together and acts like a single organism trying to protect itself, the wistleblower being perceived as an internal threat. I know, I've been in that situation and it's not very nice. Moreover, it's certainly not the best career move. In many organizations the top brass as well as branch/departmental managers etc. arrive at their positions via the Peter Principle, and those who are promoted this way are usually smart enough to know it. Even if they aren't corrupt they know that a wistleblower stands to disrupt the organization in a way that could likely threaten their position, hence their ambivalence about fixing the problem. (Presumably something similar happened at Bell.) Unfortunately, wistleblowing often doesn't cure the problem in the long run. There is however one unexpected side effect, which is one quickly learns who one's true friends are and those who have real integrity. What's surprising is that they often turn out to be those who one would least expect. "lab notebook discipline is very poor among the fraudsters, they 'lose samples' and so on" I have little doubt about that, especially if documentation is written up long after the event. There's a word of caution here though, I've sometimes rewritten notes after the event because my scrawl is almost illegible. As a result rewrites can look too good and thus appear suss. My solution is to always keep the scrawl no matter how bad it looks.