Science didn't self-correct here.
The checks and balance in the scientific systems failed so badly, a student journalist uncovered the fraud.
The problem is that Science has become in your words "Daddy" Business.
Oh, I see. Was the fraud revealed during discovery? Or was it a deathbed confession? No. But it was revealed, and championed by an undergraduate journalist.
It's important to track the provenance of ideas, and Theo Baker wasn't the first person to identify the falsified data. He has done great work keeping Stanford from burying the story, but he isn't Elizabeth Bik, combing through old Science articles looking for duplication.
And now the papers have been retracted, and the responsible party faces laughably trivial consequences, all things considered. A self-correcting system isn't going to get it right all the time. The papers were under the aegis of a powerful man, so it's not surprising that it took some time for them to be corrected.
