Modern agriculture is as much a scientific enterprise as it is a practical one, relying on a myriad of scientific fields, including molecular biology, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, veterinary medicine, mechanical engineering, geospatial informatics, and a host of others. Yet, science – the body of knowledge built by gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, making observations, and recording data – is under widespread, global assault from fraudsters. That is the frightening conclusion of a recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the NAS study, scientific fraud has reached an industrial scale and continues to grow at an astonishing pace. A large part of the problem
