Hwang Woo-suk — a national hero whose cloned stem cells never existed

In Seoul, South Korea, between 2004 and 2005, the veterinary scientist Hwang Woo-suk announced in the journal Science that he had done what no laboratory had managed before: derived human embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos, tailored to individual patients. The first paper, published on 12 March 2004, claimed a single stem-cell line created by somatic cell nuclear transfer; the second, published on 17 June 2005, claimed eleven patient-specific lines and promised rejection-free cures for incurable disease. None of the stem-cell lines was real. By January 2006 an investigation by his own university had concluded that the data and images in both papers were fabricated, and Science retracted them.

The exposure came not from the peer-review system that had certified the work but from outside it. A whistleblower among Hwang’s collaborators alerted the South Korean television program PD Su-cheop (PD Notebook), broadcast by MBC, which in November 2005 questioned both the ethics of the egg supply and the integrity of the results. As public scrutiny mounted, anonymous scientists posting online identified duplicated photographs of supposedly distinct cell lines. Seoul National University convened an investigation panel on 17 December 2005; within days it found that nine of the eleven 2005 lines were fabricated, and on 10 January 2006 it reported that all eleven were invented and that the 2004 line was fraudulent as well. Science retracted both papers on 11–12 January 2006.

Hwang had been more than a scientist; he was a state-sponsored symbol. South Korea had named him its first “Supreme Scientist,” issued a commemorative postage stamp showing a person rising from a wheelchair, and underwritten his work as a point of national prestige. That investment turned the fraud into a public trauma. When MBC first aired its doubts, advertisers withdrew and the broadcaster faced a wave of nationalist backlash for attacking a hero — a reaction that briefly protected the fraud from the very questions that would dismantle it.

The damage was both ethical and evidentiary. The eggs underpinning the research had been obtained improperly: junior researchers in Hwang’s own lab had donated, and women had been paid, in breach of bioethics norms — an estimated 2,000-plus oocytes were consumed across the program. Hwang was fired by Seoul National University in March 2006, indicted on 12 May 2006, and convicted on 26 October 2009 of embezzlement of research funds and violations of South Korea’s bioethics law, though acquitted of the core fraud charge; he received a suspended sentence. One claim survived scrutiny: Snuppy, the Afghan hound his team produced in 2005, was independently confirmed as a genuinely cloned dog.

Diederik Stapel — the star psychologist who simply typed his data into existence

In the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, the celebrated professor Diederik Stapel was suspended on 7 September 2011 after three junior researchers reported that his data looked too good to be real. They were correct. Stapel, born in 1966 and one of the most decorated social psychologists in Europe, had for years not run the experiments he published. He invented the numbers, typed clean spreadsheets at his kitchen table, and handed the fabricated files to the doctoral students whose careers he was supposedly building. There were no subjects, no surveys, no field sites — only a respected man with a laptop manufacturing the exact results his hypotheses predicted.

The verdict was delivered quickly and overwhelmingly. Tilburg announced its findings at a press conference on 31 October 2011, and a joint investigation by three committees — convened at Tilburg, Groningen and the University of Amsterdam under the chairmanship of psycholinguist Willem (Pim) Levelt — published its final report, Flawed science: The fraudulent research practices of social psychologist Diederik Stapel, on 28 November 2012. The committees identified at least 55 publications containing fabricated or manipulated data and found fraud entangled in at least ten doctoral dissertations he had supervised. By December 2015 the count of formally retracted papers had reached 58, making Stapel one of the largest single cases of data fabrication in the history of science.

Unusually for so consequential a fraud, much of it was confessed rather than merely caught. Stapel admitted the fabrication, surrendered his 1997 doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in November 2011, and in 2012 published a memoir, Ontsporing (“Derailment”), later translated as Faking Science, narrating his slide from cutting corners to inventing entire studies. In June 2013 he reached a settlement with Dutch prosecutors that spared him a criminal trial in exchange for 120 hours of community service and the forfeiture of benefits equivalent to roughly a year and a half of salary.

What makes the case a landmark is not only its scale but its target. Stapel did not fool a credulous public with a monster or a relic; he fooled the peer-review machinery of his own science. The same committees that condemned him turned their criticism outward, faulting a “verification culture” in social psychology that prized novel, media-friendly results over the unglamorous work of checking whether they were true. The fraud was personal, but the openings it exploited were structural.