Fraudulent medical researcher. Dr. William Summerlin was a respected immunologist who specialized in research on the problem of rejection of transplanted tissue. Through the 1960s, he had worked at the University of Minnesota and at Stanford. By the early 1970s, he had accepted a position at the Sloan-Kettering Institute of Cancer Research. While there, he published papers that claimed that he had performed skin grafts between two incompatible strains of mice. In 1974, he published another paper that claimed to have repeated the results of his earlier experiment.
In spite of Summerlin’s claims, colleagues following his notes were unable to duplicate his results. Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Medawar called Summerlin’s research into question. Pressed to explain himself, Summerlin eventually admitted that he had used mice that were artificially colored to make them appear to be of another strain. His work was reviewed and denounced, and Summerlin was given a permanent leave of absence. In reviewing the case, the press censured Summerlin but also criticized the system of funding in such important areas of research, which tends to reward results rather than research.