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Or more realistically, if it doesn't pass peer review, it isn't science.

That's what people would like folks to believe, but it just isn't so. There was plenty of science before there was peer review. In fact, most of science was done before there was peer review. Science and Nature are more likely than not to pan anything that is not pro-global warming. Because anti-global warming is not science? No, because they've already adopted a position and they're not going to budge.

I have personally witnessed non-scientific intransigence on a paper of my own for Nature. It didn't have anything to do with the science. We completely nailed that part in multiple ways. It was that publishing our paper would mean that Nature would have to admit that they had peer-reviewed and published a paper that was based on a seriously defective set of experiments. The mutation of a transmembrane domain the other researcher had used was not as he had published because the DNA he sent us, which he claimed to have been used in his experiments, had a single base deletion mutation immediately upstream of the TM domain and two base deletions immediately downstream, meaning that this entire region was frame shifted and created a completely different amino acid sequence than was published.

I had created the mutation based on his published sequence and had gotten different results than what he had published. I wrote to him, got a sample of his original and mutated DNA, sequenced them both, and then discovered the deletions that caused the frame shift. At first I thought this could be why he was getting different results. But when I expressed his frame shifted mutation in two different cell lines (one of them the one he used for the paper), I got expression levels that were even worse than when I was using his published sequence that I had inserted in the transmembrane domain.

I used both his published sequence as well as his actual unintentionally frame-shifted mutant to duplicate other experiments he had done, but the results were wholly different.

No one knows what DNA he had actually used to get these results, but it certainly was neither the published sequence nor his accidental frame-shift mutant. He claimed to the reviewers that his "original DNA" had no single base deletions. What he sent to us did. I had it sequenced right out of the tube. In his original paper, he had gone on to do other experiments based on the results he had claimed to have gotten with the mutant. That is, their meaning would have relevance only if his sequence would do what he had claimed it would do. We demonstrated using his cell line and our cell line, using his construct and our construct, that those results could not be obtained.

We couldn't get published because, one of the reviewers said, his paper had done so much more work that we had not "addressed". We said that that other work rested upon results that couldn't be replicated with either his actual DNA or with his published sequence of that DNA and that all that was necessary to do was to demonstrate that.