Sir

You have published articles alluding to scientific fraud in Germany (Nature 387, 750; 1997 & Nature 389, 105; 1997). Because my name was mentioned prominently on each occasion, your readers should be aware of some additional facts.

Last year I was accused in private of having been involved in falsification of scientific data. I immediately wrote a full explanation, tantamount to a confession, and then offered to resign my position at the University of Lübeck. The resignation was accepted in June 1997. I do not believe that further victimization is appropriate.

Commissions of investigation have been established by academic authorities in Berlin, Ulm, Freiburg and Lübeck. In each case the commission sat in camera, sought information from me and others on an informal basis and encouraged no formal legal representation for the accused. The commissions issued selective press releases but the full findings have not been sent to me or been made public.

I am forced to the conclusion that each commission met with the intention of limiting damage to the German academic community rather than discovering the full extent of culpability. It was only too easy to attack the person who had confessed while ignoring the evidence of greater wrongdoing that would require more rigorous investigation.

The resignation from my academic position at the University of Lübeck constituted part of a legal agreement by which I was offered a severance payment equivalent to almost one year's salary. The contract was signed by a representative of the Ministry of Science, Research, Education and Culture of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. In the event, the state government has reneged on its side of the agreement, claiming that its signatory was not authorized to sign and that the agreement is therefore void. I, however, am expected to honour my part of the bargain.

In summary, I have very readily admitted to having been involved in falsification of scientific papers, an achievement of which I am not proud. I resent, however, the fact that, because I alone have admitted my mistakes at an early stage of the investigations, official bodies have found it expedient to imply that I was the major or conceivably the only culprit and that I was responsible for false data appearing in numerous papers, on some of which I was not even a co-author.