Integrity is priceless, but investigating it doesn't come cheap either. According to a new analysis, misconduct probes can cost institutions upwards of half a million dollars.

Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York reached that figure by examining the monetary costs of one case at their institution, where a senior scientist was accused of fabricating images and data in a federal grant application (the case is still pending). Their results pegged the direct cost of the investigation thus far at around $525,000 (PLoS Med. 7, e1000318, 2010). That total includes $512,000 representative of the hours spent on the case by salaried faculty. An additional $10,000 went to wages for security, computer forensics, and IT personnel involved in sequestering lab equipment and copying data from notebooks, hard drives and other electronic devices. Clerical support costs added almost $3,000.

And that's just the baseline. Alan Hutson, a biostatistician and one of the authors of the paper, describes other potential costs, some unquantifiable. “Sometimes the investigator has three or four NIH grants, and we have to repay that money. Then there's the cost to our reputation that's even worse than the monetary cost. There are the innocent bystanders, such as the graduate students who have to find a new mentor, redo their dissertation or sometimes go to another institution.”

Other indirect costs not included in the $525,000 figure include man-hours spent on the case by senior administrative officials, the possible loss of pending grant money and the cost of supporting staff who may move to new labs.

With each case costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the total cost of investigating could be astronomical. In 2007, the latest year with such data available, research institutions filed 217 allegations of misconduct to the US Office of Research Integrity, according to agency officials. A 2009 survey of scientists found that 2% of respondents admitted to committing scientific misconduct (PLoS One 4, e5738, 2009).

Clearly, research misconduct isn't endemic to biomedicine, but when it happens—as in a recent case at the Kreitchman PET Center of Columbia University, where federal investigators found that psychiatric patients were injected with drugs known to contain impurities—the human cost is front and center.