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The secret war against counterfeit science

Nature volume 545, pages 148–150 (2017)Cite this article

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China has a lucrative market for fake research reagents. Some scientists are fighting back.

In 2013, Huang Song walked into a printing shop in northwestern Beijing and stumbled upon evidence of a brazen and widespread criminal enterprise. Huang was just 15 kilometres from Beijing’s National Institute of Biological Sciences, where he does synthetic-biology research. Scouting out a small desktop machine to produce the hundreds of labels needed for his experiments, he asked if a certain model could print on heat-resistant paper. The shop owner proudly pulled out some samples he had made for customers using the same machine.

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  1. David Cyranoski
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Cyranoski, D. The secret war against counterfeit science. Nature 545, 148–150 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/545148a

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