{"id":146788,"date":"2014-04-16T17:45:23","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=146788"},"modified":"2014-04-16T17:45:23","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:45:23","slug":"protection-whistle-blowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/protection-whistle-blowers\/","title":{"rendered":"Protection for whistle-blowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Daniel Bueno<\/span>A recent episode involving a well-known case of scientific fraud \u2013the false achievement of human cloning boasted by South Korean Woo-Suk Hwang about ten years ago \u2013 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<\/i>, physician Young-Joon Ryu has revealed that he was responsible for initiating the investigation that confirmed Hwang\u2019s act of fraud. His accusation, Ryu said, made him the brunt of threats \u2013 he and his family had to go into hiding for six months \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s account, he was unhappy because there was little potential for applying stem-cell research at that point. He was quite surprised when Hwang\u2019s team announced that they had obtained 11 embryonic stem-cell lines in a short space of time. \u201cI knew how difficult it was. It wasn\u2019t logical,\u201d 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. \u201cI was furious,\u201d 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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Protection for whistle-blowers","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[230,237],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-146788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-practices","tag-ethics","tag-genetics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146788"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=146788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}