It' funny how everyone can remember 'that guy who lied' (wakefield), but this won't make the spotlight like Wakefield did, nor will it be in the news years later like wakefield is, nor will thorsen be ostracized for what he did...it just quietly goes away.
Are you kidding? Thorsen is going to end up in jail. Wakefield did not. Research dollars are hard to come by, and Thorsen's theft hurt other researchers - he will be ostracized. Yes, the story probably will go away eventually because he certainly isn't the first guy to steal a million dollars and get caught. It's newsworthy, but hardly the story of a century.
Again, the problem with Wakefield was with his unethical and fraudulent science. It made big news because a lot of people made their choice based on his research, and so he gets credit as being one of the big factors allowing measles back into the UK, and then it turned out he'd lied in his research itself, not cheated on his taxes. If he committed some other offense such as sexually harassing an assistant or doing stealing drugs from his work to sell or something, people would have thought him an asshole who needed to lose his job (and maybe end up in jail), but that would not have automatically invalidated his research. And Wakefield's study was actually Wakefield's study, and was so from the start - it was really his project, which is why he was listed as the first author, not buried in the middle of the list the way Thorsen was.
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