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Academic fraud has reached a new level of deceit as a “predatory” journal that prints low-quality research for cash has stolen the identities of a dead doctor and the head of a Canadian science funding agency.

Sir Richard Doll was an eminent British epidemiologist who was among the first to realize that smoking causes lung cancer. He died in 2005, aged 92.

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Now his photo has popped up with an altered surname — Turner — on the list of people who supposedly edit a shady academic journal, Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics.

It’s no slip. The entire editorial board appears to be fake, though most of the other stolen identities at least belong to the living. And among them is Canadian Mario Pinto, president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, a major science funding agency. His photo is shown labeled Mario Augentaller.

Pinto sent this answer to an email inquiry: “This is indeed my photo but I have never heard of this journal.”