Dong Pyou Han, a former Iowa State University researcher charged with falsifying HIV vaccine research, says that his troubles all started as an accident. Quickly, it became a multimillion-dollar research fraud scheme that landed him in prison.
On Wednesday, Han, 57, became a rare academic to not just fall from grace but also be punished with time behind bars.
A federal judge sentenced him to more than four and half years in prison and ordered him to repay $7.2 million in grant funds his team received from the federal government using his falsified data.
Academic misconduct often doesn't even result in researchers losing their jobs, and it is even rarer for criminal charges and prison time to result from one of these cases. In 2006, a researcher pleaded guilty to falsifying information on an NIH grant and was sentenced to a year in prison -- the first time such a sentence handed down for scientific misconduct.
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Researcher who spiked rabbit blood to fake HIV vaccine results slapped with rare prison sentence - The Washington Post