[gumby]

> That sounds reasonable as far as it goes, but if you were the person next in line for that UC Davis position and your research wasn't based on falsified data, I think you'd be feeling pretty unhappy about this.

Her technique was presumably (not my field) otherwise quite good and she didn't know at the time the source data were bad. Apart from her willingness to follow up to the query on an old paper, her approach to followup was excellent. And she seems to have learnt from the experience.

All in all this sounds like what you want from a good scientist. After all once you have tenure, you can just ignore all that "old stuff" if you are so inclined.

As far as not getting the position: there are more people than tenure track positions these days so "luck of the draw" is also pretty significant.