According to scientists, life began when chemistry begat biology-that is, when simple molecules assembled into more complex molecules that then began to self-replicate.
Some projects are completely free and provide only the plans for others to build their projects, and some, like the recent crowd of desktop 3-d printers, even provide the means to self-replicate.
I've heard people argue that it would be against anyone's self-interest to cheat in science because cheating will be caught when someone tries to replicate the experiment and fails.