This is an account of the downside of scientific discovery. Not so much genuine mistakes, but succumbing to wishful thinking; observer bias; misrepresentation, by later interested parties,of what was actually done and said by the original researchers; and massaging results to the extent of downright fraud. It is not, however, a shock! horror! expose of such practices nor a modernist deconstruction of great reputations, but a serious attempt to discover how such problems arise in the scientific world.