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It seemed almost too good to be true — and it was. Two papers1, 2 that offered a major breakthrough in stem-cell biology were retracted on 2 July, mired in a controversy that has damaged the reputation of several Japanese researchers.

For scientists worldwide it has triggered painful memories of a decade-old scandal. In February 2004, South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang announced that he had generated stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos3, creating a potential source of versatile, therapeutic cells that would be genetically matched to any patient. A frenzy of excitement followed this and a subsequent publication4, but that didn’t compare with the media firestorm when the results were revealed to be fabricated. The two main cloning papers were retracted5, and the careers of some dozen scientists were devastated.

In the soul-searching that followed, ‘research integrity’ became a hot topic, scientists re-evaluated the responsibilities of authorship, and institutions vowed to improve the way that they police their staff. Nature and other journals also made promises, saying that they would...