"Fake" Research Papers out of China, in Aging Field

#84

An example…

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who was sentenced to three years in prison for illegal medical practices after conducting gene-editing experiments on human embryos that led to gene-edited babies. He was also fined, and the court said he forged ethics documents and violated biomedical research rules.

What he did

He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had edited embryos to try to make children resistant to HIV, using CRISPR on the CCR5 gene. The case became infamous because it involved human reproductive experimentation and major ethical violations.

Why he went to jail

A Shenzhen court found that he and collaborators conducted “illegal medical practices,” including fabricating ethics review documents and misleading people involved in the study. The court said they deliberately violated national regulations on biomedical research and medical ethics.

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#85

It’s getting bad out there. This tells the story.

Like this paper that says pregnant women crave prime numbers. And it was published in a peer reviewed journal.

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#86

From today’s Wall Street journal:

The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China’s Academic Stars

Shamed by a blogger, Chinese universities wage blitzkrieg against academic fraud

Compared with the glacial pace of American universities, the Chinese decision was practically a summary execution.

On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei alleged that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced a probe the same day. A month later, it said it confirmed misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and ousted the dean of the university’s Institute of Translational Medicine.

A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China and perhaps the nation’s most powerful person in medical science. With a single five-minute video, the 33-year-old graduate-school dropout can stop an academic star’s career in its tracks.

“The main reason they moved so fast is the sheer scale of the public outcry I can generate,” Geng said in an interview. “The universities simply couldn’t afford to wait.”

His latest video came on June 21, attacking a 2025 paper in Nature, one of the world’s top scientific journals. The university employing some of the paper’s authors quickly announced an investigation, and Nature said last week it was probing the paper, which described a potential patch for delivering medicine to internal organs. The authors of the paper said they were cooperating with the investigation and declined to comment further.

Chinese universities, once a backwater in cutting-edge medical research, are now among the most influential in the world, and Chinese-developed drugs are increasingly finding their way into American medicine cabinets. That makes Geng’s allegations of rampant misconduct by top scholars more than a parochial matter.

Geng said he consulted his network of friends and peers and investigated hundreds of papers. “The cases we finally choose to expose are the absolute worst of the worst—the ones with egregious, clear-cut misconduct,” he said.
According to the Nature Index, which measures contributions to leading scientific journals, seven of the top 10 institutions worldwide in health sciences are in China.

Read the full article: The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China’s Academic Stars

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#87

Give credit where credit is due. China is stepping up. The scale of fraud is epic, but at least the Chinese authorities move with speed and determination. I applaud them, and cheer them on. You might call me a China optimist. I am not blind to the flaws, but my expectation is that the Chinese people will figure it out in the long run.

Meanwhile, it’s a drastic and sad contrast to the farce that is research and publishing integrity in the West. Here fraudsters face almost no consequences and even have their institutions cover up for them. At worst the fraudsters are deprived of funding for a couple of years or they move to another institution to continue their fraud. Legal consequences or jail time are practically nonexistent. And yet this is outright fraud, including financial when the budget is wasted, and it does incredible harm by misdirecting other researchers who then waste money and efforts on a wild goose chase. There are fraudsters who operate for decades, sometimes with the complicity of their institutions. This has knock-on consequences in corrupting their collaborators and polluting the literature. We need to start looking at serious prison time and lifelong bans from any research and publishing. China looks like it’s getting serious. When are we going to step up to the plate?

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#88

Totally agreed. Academia at most universities is very strange when you think about it. Professors are scientists who have gone through lots of years of lab work, but end up having many different roles that don’t really make sense. You’re supposed to be teaching students in classes, mentoring them in the lab, writing grants for potential projects, publishing the papers, and often trying to run side businesses like making money from consulting, text books, or spinouts. You end up with the paper publishing becoming a bit of a game. I think research institutes, where you have stable long-term funding, and not so much pressure, make sense. However, when a large % of your salary depends on being able to get grants and publish papers, the incentive to cheat increases. I would like tp believe that if you paid research fellows a good salary of 300k per year, banned consulting, gave very long and stable research grants, you’d get excellent results. Most people in that position are going to be highly motivated and curiosity driven and you take away incentives for dishonesty.

One issue is that we are not trained for most of the roles we end up trying to fill. We have no formal training in teaching or pedagogy. Usually we aren’t well trained in writing. There is no universal system for how to record your results, write lab books, curate data. Most things are not traceable. Many things are not reproducible because of poor recording keeping, failing to maintain proper documentation etc. It’s basically every individual making decisions for him/herself.

And yes, I totally agree that a lot of literature is essentially corrupted. As I said earlier, I’ve seen results in published papers that are literally impossible to occur.

And hell, there’s a hilarious scandal going on right now: https://cen.acs.org/research-integrity/Sleuths-say-Thermo-Fisher-doctored/104/web/2026/05

So a major, major, manufacturer of antibodies was found fabricating the example images on the website. And I’m sure 10,000s of papers have been published using those antibodies. How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated? – Reese Richardson

And again, it’s a huge Western company which is responsible. Another big hit to “our” credibility IMO. Meanwhile, there is a rapidly growing Chinese industry for biomedical research tools.

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#89

Government media in China are egging Geng on, expressing concern that the country’s reputation is at risk. “If even leading scholarly teams cannot guarantee the authenticity and reliability of their research, how can we possibly expect to build a solid foundation of scientific integrity across society?” said the official Xinhua News Agency in a commentary about cases exposed by Geng.

If the Communist Party of China is taking the research fraud problem seriously, that deserves a round of applause.

It’s not surprising it’s happening, that’s where the money is. The PRC is spending big on science as anyone who’ve browsed Google Scholar can tell.

Alternatively one option is to get rid of government funding of science altogether. The free market would probably be more efficient and less corrupt as the funders would analyze funded papers with a microscope, but be smaller in scale…

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#90

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02143-x

Nobel-winning chemist leaves US to direct AI materials lab in China

Omar Yaghi’s move comes amid cuts to US science and a campaign in China to recruit top international talent.

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