Just wanted to alert you to a very well-reported article (and accompanying editorial) about a recent scandal in structural chemistry in which a prominent PI (Homme Hellinga) accused his student of fraud after another lab spent significant time and money showing that two papers' conclusions were wrong.
(Link: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080514/full/453275a.html)

Both the article and the editorial mention that the independent PI who refuted Hellinga's findings did so at "no discernable benefit to his own career".

This is a perfect example of the perverse incentives that encourage labs to publish work first, often with data that is shoddy at best, fraudulent at worst.

One way to improve these perverse incentives is to give more credit to those who reproduce or refute others' findings. Though there will never be a perfect formula, we should strive/collaborate to come up with the best system possible to gauge an individual's overall contribution to science.