A SCIENTIFIC FRAUD SCANDAL IN FRANCE

In the spring of 2000, three French scientists (Bernard Seret, Laurent Pouyaud, and George Serre), one of whom (Seret) was an ichthyologist at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris (FR), submitted to the journal Nature an article claiming a prior discovery in 1995 of a coelacanth in Indonesian waters (thus preempting the 1998 discovery of M.V. Erdmann et al), the Seret et al submitted article including a photograph of their captured fish. The French group stated they were unable to register their specimen in 1995 because it failed to reach the museum to which it had been sent. They stated they photographed the fish at the time, then lost the photograph while moving house, and only found the photograph again in the year 2000.

In addition to the question of priority of discovery, the scientific implications of the findings of the French team were that it would extend the distribution of living coelacanths, since the French fish was stated to have been caught more than 2000 kilometers from the spot where Erdmann et al found the 1998 specimen, which suggests a larger distribution of the fish in the Indo-West Pacific region.

What happened was that staff people at Nature noticed that the photograph submitted by B. Seret et al and the photograph by M.V. Erdmann et all previously published two years before were virtually identical. The Seret et al paper was refused by Nature, and the French photograph was denounced as an outright fake. Apparently what was done was to use computer graphics software to simply cut and paste the 1998 Erdmann et all fish into another photograph, moving the coelacanth onto a table with two other ordinary fish as though all three fish were in the same catch. When presented with the hard evidence that the two coelacanth photos are identical, the Seret et al response was that the picture was "taken by a friend who later died and whose widow gave it to Serre before moving abroad." In the 13 July 2000 Nature issue in reference below, the apparently faked photo and the original photo published in 1998 by Erdmann et all appear side by side for comparison.

Again, aside from the farcical aspects here (clipping a photograph of an unusual object from a journal article and using the clipped photograph to fake another photograph submitted as "evidence" in another article sent to the very same journal), it should be recognized that a bit more cleverness with computer software might have made the fake unrecognizable as such, and steered coelacanth specialists onto a false trail for decades. That is not amusing.