I'm glad you stood your ground. But what I don't get is the mindset of everyone who wanted to publish the potentially-faulty data. The moment anyone tries to build on the result, its faultiness will be known. Is that not more embarrassing?
Everyone involved was rather sheepish afterwards except the post doc. He had felt much the same as me, but didn’t feel he could raise the issue with his boss. Privately he was very grateful I had stood up to his boss, as he didn’t feel he could do the same and was under enormous pressure to pump out the data. All round not good.
The problem is not that most scientists are not trying to do the right thing, but that they are under enormous pressure to pump out the results. It only takes a few falling to this pressure to destroy the public’s faith in science - the consequence of this are catastrophic.
We must solve this problem or we will not have science.
To take a simplistic example: a publication norm which includes instructions for reproduction, ideally requiring as little resources as possible.
Systems are getting increasingly complex as well. In my lab, it literally takes several weeks for people to learn how to do our assay, and that's with constant feedback from an experienced user. Every step is published but that still doesn't help when things don't go according to plan. Also, not every lab has the same equipment. Even if we provided free training, a lab would still need to drop $300k to get all the machines required, which are not common.
Not every result is worth reproducing either. If someone publishes a paper that shows several lines of evidence for the same thing and they've done all reasonable controls, and it doesn't disagree with any existing models, why would you reproduce that? Outside of deliberate fraud, it's a pretty solid bet that it's true, and you can save enormous amounts of time and money by proceeding to build off of it instead of reproducing it first. And that's really what it comes down to: no one's paying you to do this kind of work. Governments would have to fund it, because you're fundamentally asking for twice as much work to be done, which will cost twice as much money (and time).
But take heart: when someone DOES make an outrageous claim, it's very common for labs to try to reproduce it (or really, disprove it). See [1] and [2] for recent examples.
[1] "STAP stem cell controversy ends in suicide for Japanese scientist" http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap-ste... [2] "Water bears’ genetic borrowing questioned" https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-bears%E2%80%99-gen...
Publishing questionable results quickly has many benefits (if you happen to be right) and few consequences. Just don't draw too much attention to yourself by over-hyping.
Another anecdote - a certain famous professor (since dead) at my alma mater managed to destroy at least three PhD students careers via fraud. He had faked up the initial data and then put them to work on projects based on the fake data. The whole thing only came to light (internal only as it was all hushed up) when he died and his students moved to a new supervisor.