The height of trust rot is Science publishing Woo Suk Hwang's 2005 stem cell research. This was one of the top scientific journals publishing research that appeared to be a nobel-prize track line of research that would have been a breakthrough in medical treatment. Instead it tainted a line of research.

The research results were fraudulent, claiming a much higher success rate at generating a stem cell line than what was achieved. They lied about the number of stem cell lines generated, the number of oocytes used to generate the stem cell lines, and the number of donors the oocytes came from.

As if bad data wasn't enough, they lied both to their donors, lied about their donors, and miscredited authors.