sciencemag.org SCIENCE P H O T O : © T H O M A S G E D M IN A S I t’s a cold, dreary day in early March, and Josefin Sundin is standing in one of the two aquarium rooms at the Ar Research Station on a remote corner of Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. “This is where it all happened,” she says, while gazing around as if searching for fresh clues. Her colleague and friend Fredrik Jutfelt takes cellphone pictures. Nine months ago, these two researchers triggered a scandal in Swedish science by accusing another friend and colleague of making up research supposedly done here. Now, they have returned to Gotland to discuss what happened—and how whistleblowing has taken over their lives. The station is deserted; the 2017 research season has yet to start. But the station manager, Anders Nissling, has made a pot of strong coffee and is happy to give a tour of the offices and laboratories where researchers come to study the creatures and ecosystems of the sea and a nearby lake. At the heart of the case is a three-page paper that made headlines after it was published in Science* on 3 June 2016. It showed that, given a choice between a natural diet and tiny plastic fragments, perch larvae will consume the plastic “like teens eat fast food,” as a BBC story put it. This unhealthy appetite reduced their growth and made them more vulnerable to predators. It was a dire warning, suggesting the plastic trash washing into rivers, lakes, and oceans was creating ecological havoc. The study was also, Sundin and Jutfelt claim, “a complete fantasy.” It was purportedly done at the Ar station in the spring of 2015 by Oona Lönnstedt, a research fellow at Sweden’s Uppsala University (UU); her supervisor and only co-author, Peter Eklöv, did not work on the island. Sundin, a postdoc at UU, was working at the station at that time, too, and occasionally lent Lönnstedt a hand. But she saw no sign of a study of the scope and size described in Science. Jutfelt, who like Sundin is Swedish but works as an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, also spent a few days at the station when the study supposedly took place, and didn’t see it either. Lönnstedt wasn’t even on the island long enough to do the study described in Science, the duo claims. Many other details were, well, fishy, they said, such as Lönnstedt’s claim that part of the study’s data was forever lost because her laptop was stolen 10 days after the paper was published. A group of five aquatic ecologists and physiologists elsewhere in the world has helped Sundin and Jutfelt sort through a mounting pile of evidence and make Accusations of research fraud roil a tight-knit community of ecologists FEATURES

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生意兴隆

sciencemag.org 科学照片：© THOMASGEDM IN ASI 三月初寒冷而沉闷的一天，Josefin Sundin 正站在位于波罗的海的瑞典岛屿哥特兰岛偏远角落的 Ar 研究站的两个水族馆中的一个海。“这就是一切发生的地方，”她一边说，一边环顾四周，仿佛在寻找新的线索。她的同事兼朋友 Fredrik Jutfelt 用手机拍照。九个月前，这两位研究人员指责另一位朋友和同事编造了据称在这里完成的研究，从而引发了瑞典科学界的丑闻。现在，他们已返回哥特兰岛，讨论发生的事情——以及举报如何影响他们的生活。车站空无一人；2017年的研究季尚未开始。但是车站经理安德斯·尼斯林 煮了一壶浓咖啡，很高兴参观办公室和实验室，研究人员来这里研究海洋和附近湖泊的生物和生态系统。该案例的核心是一篇 3 页的论文，该论文于 2016 年 6 月 3 日发表在《科学》* 上后成为头条新闻。它表明，在自然饮食和微小塑料碎片之间做出选择时，鲈鱼幼虫会吃掉塑料“就像青少年吃快餐一样，”正如 BBC 的一个故事所说。这种不健康的食欲降低了它们的生长速度，使它们更容易受到捕食者的攻击。这是一个可怕的警告，表明流入河流、湖泊和海洋的塑料垃圾正在造成生态破坏。Sundin 和 Jutfelt 声称，这项研究也是“完全的幻想”。据称，它是由 Oona Lönnstedt 于 2015 年春天在 Ar 站完成的，瑞典乌普萨拉大学（UU）研究员；她的导师和唯一的合著者 Peter Eklöv 不在岛上工作。当时 UU 的博士后 Sundin 也在该站工作，偶尔会向 Lönnstedt 伸出援手。但她没有看到对《科学》中描述的范围和规模进行研究的迹象。喜欢 Sundin 的 Jutfelt 是瑞典人，但在特隆赫姆的挪威科技大学担任副教授，据推测进行这项研究时，他也在该站呆了几天，但也没有看到。两人声称，Lönnstedt 在岛上的时间还不够长，无法进行《科学》中描述的研究。他们说，还有许多其他细节，嗯，可疑，例如 Lönnstedt 声称该研究的部分数据永远丢失了，因为她的笔记本电脑在论文发表 10 天后被盗。