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The aim of this research is to analyze the different types of sensitive topics that can be observed in the course of scientific research, identify the roots of their sensitive nature, explore their effects, and propose methods for how to handle them. The most common typology distinguishes between subjects dealing with painful personal experiences, deviant behavior, people or entities with power, and sacred or taboo themes. Transposing this typology to the methods used in research yields a distinction between errors, fraud, manipulation, and scientific deconstructions. This exploratory research uses the case study method. It reveals that sensitive scientific topics are detected by artificial intelligence applications and made public on social media at an ever faster rate. These topics have increasingly wide-ranging and lasting impacts on the careers and reputations of the researchers involved. These effects are more detrimental when the researchers are respected by the academic community. Among the types of issues observed, two involve ethical violations (fraud and manipulation) but two do not a priori violate scientific ethics (errors and deconstructions). The presence of an ethical violation alone is therefore apparently not sufficient to render a subject sensitive, unlike the criterion of its negative effects on the reputations and/or behavior of researchers, which is revealed to be universal. Subjects are perceived as more sensitive if they raise radical, taboo questions or express doubts about the validity of dominant theories or the social conformity of behavior. The most sensitive subjects’ question—or deconstruct—concepts, heuristics, theories, or paradigms accepted by the scientific community and deeply rooted in the culture. This research contributes to the ongoing reflection on scientific relativism that is proliferating in all disciplines. It shows that “desensitization” of a subject requires open debate between the parties concerned, critical analyses of perceptions of the subject, and a search for greater “theoretical sensitivity.”