However, this story demonstrates why the publish or perish model is so screwed up today. When your promotion, funding, livelihood are directly connected to positive research findings and publications in high impact journals, deception in the face of desperation will certainly happen. Ethics be damned.
Frankly, this is one of the reasons I think I want to only do research part time, focusing the majority of my time on clinical work as a physician. My salary would not entirely or really even remotely be dependent on grants or publications, and I could just slowly build up on some projects. Is progress slower, could your project be scooped? Certainly, but it sure wouldn’t force me to falsify results to make publications more appealing.
Who knows, though. Maybe everyone is susceptible to the rat race.