Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
As someone pointed out above, in fields where you collection and analysis times are measured in years if not decades you could run into trouble, but for chemistry and biology where you are at significantly shorter collection timescales, it isn't that big of an issie