Munich

It's like a murder without a body. An alleged case of scientific misconduct has hit the headlines in Germany and Switzerland, even though no published scientific paper has been implicated.

On 11 February, the German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported allegations of bad scientific practice brought by a postdoc who used to work in the lab of 1996 Nobel prizewinner Rolf Zinkernagel.

“The damage to our reputation is huge,” says Zinkernagel, who is director of the University of Zurich's Institute of Experimental Immunology.

The allegations of the former postdoc, a 35-year-old German medical scientist, centre on a manuscript submitted to Science last February. She claims that data in the paper were manipulated and that the article listed her as a co-author without her consent. The paper, a study of a cancer vaccine in mice, was withdrawn within hours of her protest.

Although Zinkernagel was not a co-author on the manuscript, the mice experiments were carried out in his lab. The study was led by Martin Bachmann, chief scientific officer of the Zurich-based vaccine company Cytos Biotechnology. Zinkernagel is a member of Cytos' scientific advisory board and has long been Bachmann's scientific mentor.

But bad blood has developed between Zinkernagel and his former postdoc, who claims that Zinkernagel was wrong not to halt the alleged manipulation of data in the study. “There was no publication and therefore no damage to science,” says Zinkernagel, who feels unfairly smeared by the affair.

The university's attempts to resolve the postdoc's complaints failed. A subsequent independent investigation, however, reported that the submitted manuscript was misleading, concluding that Bachmann violated rules of good scientific practice. But Bachmann says that inadvertent errors were immediately corrected. The media response is a personal disaster for him, he says.

The postdoc was dissatisfied with the outcome and over the next few months she asked various newspapers and journals, including Nature, to publish the story.