He boldly, brashly called his innovation “The Thong Method.”

But now it seems that physicist Le Duc Thong’s actual method may have been simply an egregious habit of clicking on the “cut” and “paste” keys. Evidence of plagiarism has caused six scientific journals to retract or reject seven papers bearing Thong’s name in the past two years. In one instance, he apparently copied an entire article and presented it as his own. Several colleagues—including Thong’s wife—say he attached their names to his work without their knowledge or consent. At the age of 31, Thong can kiss his career goodbye. The tale would be pathetic anywhere, but it’s particularly sad for Vietnam. An American, Italian or Japanese scientist, say, who is accused of such ethical misconduct would be considered an outlier and a scoundrel. But in a developing nation, Thong’s misdeeds stain the reputation of the Vietnamese physics field, said, Dr. Cao Huy Thien, vice director of the Ho Chi Minh City Institute of Physics, which had employed Thong until he was forced to resign. Precisely how Thong’s rich pattern of misdeeds surfaced is not clear. His research specialty, including his discredited “method,” concerned the esoteric field of “the fine-structure constant”—whatever that means. Readers of peer-reviewed journals such as “Astrophysics and Space Science” may have simply recognized long passages that looked familiar—perhaps identical to their own original work. It’s fair to wonder whether Thong also used such shortcuts to achieve his prior academic success. Contrary to the old saying, cheaters sometimes prosper, and sometimes do so for many years. Academics in the West, who in the past relied on a honor system to discourage cheating and came down hard in the rare occasions that it was discovered, have for more than a decade recognized the ease with which computers and the Internet enables students, researchers, journalists and others to appropriate the work of others and present it as their own. Cutting-and-pasting is hallmark example of the how the Internet has accelerated the creative—no, make that the production process. These tools also served a corrupt cottage industry in which university students paid for the production of academic papers that were little more than cut-and-paste jobs. As signs of plagiarism proliferated, professors turned the digital technology against such cheating. Like a supercharged Google, sophisticated search technology can compare a student’s or for that matter a professor’s work to a vast database of published literature and sniff out both verbatim copies and work that seems suspiciously familiar. Academics need to be vigilant in policing their own. The same holds true for leaders in my field, journalism. In recent years, incidents of plagiarism and outright fiction in American journalism rightly brought several careers to an ignominious end. Much as Vietnam’s scientific community is now sighing over the misdeeds of Le Duc Thong, American journalists were dismayed and outraged by the notorious case of Jayson Blair, a young reporter at the proud, mighty New York Times. Gradually, the credibility of his work came under scrutiny. Although one editor wrote a memo suggesting that Blair wasn’t trustworthy, higher-ranking editors assigned him to prominent stories. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, the reasoning went, when one of his stories closely mirrored an article by a young reporter at another paper. After some supposed “scoops” on a sensational serial killer case—and denunciations from law enforcement brass that the Times stories were simply wrong—suspicion that Blair was relying on bad sources gradually gave way to fact that he was relying on his own imagination. The particular circumstances of Blair’s rise and fall also led to the resignations of the New York Times top two editors. They were blamed, in part, for creating the atmosphere that enabled Blair to thrive, at least temporarily, and bring shame to the institution. The scandal and others served to raise questions and encourage scrutiny elsewhere in the profession. A seemingly successful newspaper columnist in California’s state capital quit in a huff after an internal investigation determined that on a number of occasions she had passed off fiction as fact for at least a few years. A former colleague of mine at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter who had covered combat in Afghanistan, would lose his job after he was found to have fabricated elements of a colorful story that outraged a college town. Should Thong’s ethical lapses been sensed earlier? “ Thong was never serious about doing scientific research despite advice and even warning from his seniors,” Dr Nguyen Mong Giao, vice president of HCMC-based Hung Vuong University, told Tuoi Tre. Yet Giao is also reported to have helped Thong land a job. Thong used Gia’s name on three articles, two of which have been retracted by journals and another that hasn’t been—not yet, anyway, Figures like Le Duc Thong and Jayson Blair, presumably bright young men with deeply flawed characters, always raise the same question: Why did they do it? What were they thinking? What made them think they could get away with it? Stories about purveyors of fraud—facsimiles in one case, falsehoods in another—are best viewed as cautionary tales. The story, in the end, is the ugly truth.