US vaccine researcher sentenced to prison for fraud

Post date: Jul 13, 2015 10:25:15 AM

An article in Nature describes the case of Dong-Pyou Han who tampered with HIV trials.

It is clear that authors feel that his prison sentence was an over-reaction, but I am not sure. He had already used millions of research dollars on a vaccine that clearly had no future. If he was not caught, he would have continued to waste money and may even have costed lives indirectly through distracting research from more promising venues and even directly through human trials. Incarceration may be extreme, but the original punishment of refusing him federal funding for 3 years was a severe under-reaction.