It will have been easy for physicists to look on smugly at the recent shenanigans in the biosciences that have seen Woo Suk Hwang and his group at the Seoul National University in Korea charged with scientific misconduct. Hwang wrote two fraudulent papers that appeared in Science. In the first, from 2004, he claimed to have cloned human embryos by taking the genetic material from a woman’s normal cells and combining it with her eggs; he said the embryos were then used to grow stem cells (303 1669). Then, last year, Hwang claimed to have created stem cells using cells and eggs from different donors (308 1777). Science last month retracted the latter paper, the other having already been withdrawn by its authors. Days later it was then reported that Jon Sudbø, a cancer researcher from the Norwegian Radium Hospital, had published fake results in The Lancet (366 1359).

But physicists should not forget that misconduct can occur on their patch too: in 2002 Jan Hendrik Schön was charged with misconduct and sacked by Bell Labs for fabricating and falsifying data in a series of high-profile papers in condensed-matter physics. Falsifying research results appears all too tempting, and it would be unwise to think that a case like that of Hwang or Schön could never happen again.