Universities oust deans and fire researchers after viral videos
On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei published a five-minute video alleging that Shanghai University scientists had fabricated data in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced an investigation the same day. One month later, it said it had confirmed the misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and removed the dean of its Institute of Translational Medicine.
“The main reason they moved so fast is the sheer scale of the public outcry I can generate,” Geng said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “The universities simply couldn’t afford to wait.”
Geng, 33, was studying in a Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering when he began posting on social media a few years ago. He dropped out last year, telling the Journal he found the content business more lucrative than any academic career he could expect.
Geng’s latest video, on June 21, attacked a 2025 paper in Nature describing a potential patch for delivering medicine to internal organs. The university employing some of the paper’s authors quickly announced an investigation, and Nature said last week it was probing the paper. The authors told the Journal they were cooperating with the investigation and declined to comment further.
In the past two months, four major Chinese universities have punished senior scholars over errors in papers flagged by Geng, each within weeks, the Journal reported.
The flurry of cases has drawn attention from Chinese state media. Xinhua News Agency published a commentary expressing concern about the country’s scientific reputation, asking how society could “build a solid foundation of scientific integrity” if leading research teams cannot guarantee the authenticity of their work.
Chinese universities, once a backwater in cutting-edge medical research, are now among the most influential globally. 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. Chinese-developed drugs are increasingly entering American markets, making the allegations of misconduct more than a domestic issue.
Geng said he consulted a 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.
His videos have mainly targeted papers published by Springer Nature, a top scientific publisher. At least six papers in Nature journals, including two in its flagship journal, now carry editor’s notes stating that an investigation is underway, according to the Journal. None have been retracted, although Nature Medicine last week retracted a separate paper about cancer treatment led by Chinese researchers that Geng had not spotlighted.
Erika Pastrana, a vice president whose duties include overseeing Nature’s research journals, told the Journal the publisher was working as quickly as possible to assess the flagged papers but added that “it is important that all aspects of the claims are carefully and comprehensively assessed.”
Geng attributed the discrepancy in speed between Chinese and American investigations to differing levels of urgency. “Technically speaking, the actual investigation doesn’t take that much work,” he said. In one instance in Nature, he said, “the methods used to falsify the data were incredibly primitive.”
Elisabeth Bik, a Dutch-American microbiologist known for investigating problematic papers, told the Journal that China puts enormous pressure on its doctors and scientists to publish. “Impossible rules are leading people to cheat,” she said. She lauded Geng’s efforts but warned that future fraud might be harder to detect. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game, and the fraudsters are always one step ahead of us,” she said.
Geng, who said he modeled his work on Bik’s, proposed that each scientist’s experiments be repeated by a colleague before publication. “If a researcher knows their peer will be replicating their work next week, they simply won’t dare to cheat,” he said.
Geng’s tone has grown more strident as he uncovers more apparent fraud, which he attributes to junior researchers chasing career advancement and senior professors letting misconduct go unchecked to burnish their own records.
“We must send a chilling message to these powerful leaders that turning a blind eye is no longer a safe option,” Geng said in a recent video. “You must be held strictly accountable for your lab’s raw data. If you refuse to manage it, you are actively planting a ticking time bomb under your own career.”
U.S. universities say they strive to avoid a rush to judgment, arguing that determining responsibility for errors — and whether they were intentional — can be difficult on papers with many authors.
Asked about the lengthy U.S. probes, Geng said the fakery was often obvious. “The difference in speed is entirely about their level of urgency,” he said.