We had a discussion on lying a while back. My position is that lying is never appropriate. I bet Eric Poehlman wishes he had listened to me. From the New York Times Magazine:
Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison.
One of his lab techs turned him in, rightfully so. Fascinating article.