Daniel BuenoA recent episode involving a well-known case of scientific fraud –the false achievement of human cloning boasted by South Korean Woo-Suk Hwang about ten years ago – has sparked a debate about the lack of protection for researchers who report cases of misconduct, especially when the accusation is made by a subordinate. In an interview given to the journal Nature, physician Young-Joon Ryu has revealed that he was responsible for initiating the investigation that confirmed Hwang’s act of fraud. His accusation, Ryu said, made him the brunt of threats – he and his family had to go into hiding for six months – and forced him to leave his job. Ryu, who is currently a researcher at Kangwon National University, in South Korea, worked for two years at Hwang’s laboratory at Seoul National University, where he led a team responsible for stem-cell research. In April 2004, before Hwang published his first fraudulent article, Ryu left the laboratory to work at the Korea Cancer Centre Hospital. According to Ryu’s account, he was unhappy because there was little potential for applying stem-cell research at that point. He was quite surprised when Hwang’s team announced that they had obtained 11 embryonic stem-cell lines in a short space of time. “I knew how difficult it was. It wasn’t logical,” he recalled. He soon found out that Hwang was working on a clinical trial for a 10-year-old with a spinal cord injury. According to Ryu, Hwang had promised the boy that he would walk again. “I was furious,” said Ryu. Lacking concrete evidence and worried that his identity might be revealed, Ryu did not go either to the university or to the police. Instead, he emailed a South Korean television network and recommended an investigation. When the first report about the fraud was aired, Hwang learned that his former subordinate was the author of the accusations. Ryu says his blog was subsequently hacked. He and his wife began receiving threats and so they kept a low profile until he could find a job elsewhere. In December 2013, Ryu decided to tell his story on a blog. Bernd Pulverer, head of scientific publications at the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, told Nature that the episode illustrates the risks that still surround the act of reporting misconduct. The Hwang case, says Pulverer, shows how much still remains to be done to improve protection for whistle-blowers and to encourage the constructive reporting of fraud, both of which are subjects that continue to receive little attention from science institutions.
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