Plagiarism in Music

Consider the well known songs Blurred lines and Stay With Me. What do they have in common? These are two examples of popular songs that were accused of being plagiarized from other pieces of music. For this week’s blog I am going to take a slightly different angle on my overall topic of plagiarism and […]

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is frequently in the news for various political scandals. However, in the past his negative publicity has even included plagiarism. In 2000 reporters asked the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute for a copy of Putin’s doctoral thesis but were refused. A few years later in 2005 two researchers finally got their hands on […]

Watson and Crick

In the past couple weeks I have received multiple suggestions that I discuss question of who discovered the structure of DNA. For a long time the credit was given to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, who won a Nobel prize in for their work in 1962. Later on people realized there was a […]

Richard Owen

My subject for this week’s investigation of stolen ideas and discoveries is Sir Richard Owen. He was a British anatomist and paleontologist who lived from 1804-1892, and as a rampant plagiarist, he is proof that being knighted by the queen does not necessarily prevent one from stooping to the level of stealing others’ scientific discoveries. […]