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transistors were published in prominent scientific journals including Science and Nature. However,
no research group anywhere in the world succeeded in reproducing Schön’s results (Service, 2002).
In May 2002, Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate the scandal. On September 25, 2002, the
committee publicly released its report which contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct. Bell
Labs fired Schön on the day that they received the report. Schön returned to Germany and took a job
at an engineering firm. In June 2004 the University of Konstanz from where he had obtained his Ph.D.,
issued a press release stating that Schön’s doctoral degree has been revoked due to “dishonourable
conduct”.

Yoshiki Sasai, a noted stem-cell scientist at the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology (CDB) in
Kobe, Japan co-authored two controversial papers that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature
in January, 2014. The lead author of these papers was Haruko Obokata. These papers reported a
remarkably simple way of making stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells that
could be grown into tissue anywhere in the body. However, based on allegations of irregularities in
several images in the papers authored by Obokata, RIKEN launched an investigation and the two
papers were retracted on July 2, 2014. The reasons cited for retraction were duplicated and mixed-up
images, mislabelling, faulty descriptions and “inexplicable discrepancies in genetic background and
transgene insertion sites between the donor mice and the reported.” Obakata’s supervisor, Sasai was
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hospitalized for nearly a month in March 2014 due to psychological stress related to the scandal. He
could not bear the humiliation and ended his life on August 5, 2014. This is one of the most tragic
outcomes of the violation of research ethics.
Such glaring examples of unethical conduct are also found in Indian Science. One case in point is
that of Vishwa Jit Gupta, the Indian palaeontologist from Punjab University who specialized in
fossil record of the Himalayan region. He published innumerable papers on Himalayan fossils.
John Talent (1989) in accusing Gupta of giving false and misleading information regarding the sites
of the discovery of fossils. The most deliberate of these violations was obtaining fossils from shops,
museums, and academic establishments and then claiming to have found them in the Himalaya. It
took Talent nine long years to unearth this scandal. He painstakingly visited many of the places in
the Himalaya where Gupta claimed to have found the fossils in order to verify facts. Subsequently,
Gupta was dismissed from the post of Director of the Institute of Palaeontology at Punjab National
University.
Chemistry’s colossal fraud was committed by Pattium Chiranjeevi of Sri Venkateswara University
(SVU), who wrote over 70 articles for journals between 2003 and 2007 only by downloading
articles from the internet. The misconduct came to light when SVU conducted an investigation
into Chiranjeevi’s work after journal editors wrote to the university officials with evidence that the
professor had plagiarized, falsified, and fabricated many manuscript submissions (Schulz, 2008). The
professor claimed to have used some advanced instruments, which were not available at the university.
He was also accused of duplicate submission of the same material to several journals. Chiranjeevi has
since be barred from research and research supervision and from holding any administrative position
in the university.

There are many such instances of violation of ethical norms in Indian Science from the recent past.
About 130 papers published in peer-reviewed journals by scientists from CSIR-Indian Institute of
Toxicology Research have been declared to be problematic. A chief scientist from the institute is
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involved in forty such papers. In the Pubpeer report, about 35 papers published from CSIR-Central
Drug Research Institute have images that have been manipulated and/or duplicated. The Pubpeer
website also reports 37 papers with manipulated and duplicated images from CSIR-Indian Institute of
Chemical Biology.

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