A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (£11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misrepresentation says the landmark case has led to a surge in whistleblowers coming forward.

“I’ve definitely seen an uptick in inquiries – I have many more than I can work on right now,” explained Eugenie Reich, a Boston-based lawyer who used the False Claims Act to sue the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In December, the centre����after admitting using images and data that were����in support of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The False Claims Act allows private citizens to sue on behalf of the US government if firms or institutions have submitted false claims to gain federal contracts, with judges able to award whistleblowers up to 30 per cent of the settlement. In this case, 17.5 per cent of the settlement will go to Sholto David, a doctoral graduate of Newcastle University in the UK, who filed the claim in April 2024 three months after he posted about the allegations on the blog��For Better Science.

However, it was Reich, a former��New Scientist��writer who retrained as a lawyer in 2015, who alerted David to the possibility of bringing the case privately through her firm. As a result, David will now share��about $2.8 million (£2 million) with his legal team��– potentially the first time an��external whistleblower using publicly available documents��has received a payout of this magnitude. Acting as a witness for a Department of Justice (DoJ)-run case, he would have received nothing.

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Speaking to��Times Higher Education, Reich said the legal action highlighted not only the potential for financial reward from whistleblowing in the US but the moral case for raising a complaint.

“It’s been good to have more inquiries but equally satisfying is the public awareness of this issue,” explained Reich, who also worked for BBC’s��Horizon science programme��prior to becoming a lawyer.

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“Increasingly, the public understands this is not just a misrepresentation in a paper somewhere that only scientists care about. They are asking ‘why have these people done it, and what’s the damage?’” said Reich, who said the consequences of research fraud were not always clear.

“Sometimes we have very clear damage – maybe a clinical trial involving patients that should never have happened. People might have died. But it’s not always that simple,” she acknowledged.

“In this case, they’ve misdirected grants and those grants could have gone to more careful, less flashy researchers, who by now would have made more progress. That is important because we’ve spent money on something that hasn’t worked and probably won’t work because it’s been misrepresented,” Reich explained.

Increasing awareness about potential harms was important, explained Reich, because whistleblowers are often portrayed as being “disgruntled competitors trying to shoot down a rival”.

“This is the only business where we feel someone is disgruntled because they’re playing by the rules and then seek to report someone else who is cheating. We would usually say ‘that’s problem behaviour’, not the complainant is disgruntled,” she continued.

“Now I think people calling things out are more likely to be recognised as speaking from [a place of] integrity or wanting fairness and a level playing field in their discipline. They’re less likely to be seen as disgruntled competitors,” Reich continued.

For Reich, the False Claims Act’s provision to allow privately brought prosecutions on behalf of the federal government has been a game-changer because it is one of the few levers that can be used to tackle alleged research misconduct.

“There are very good lawyers in this topic, but they all work for institutions, journals, accused researchers because you can’t really have the scientific record hiring a lawyer on its own to speak for it. You can’t have a legal claim which says ‘I’m the scientific record and you’ve put fraud in me’,” Reich said.

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Reich moved from the UK to the US in 2001 after taking a degree in physics and philosophy��at the University of Oxford. She is alert to the criticism that the ability to bring private cases could be viewed as a part of America’s “horribly litigious society where people can sue because they spill coffee on their lap and so on”.

“But that culture developed for a reason. America is a very highly capitalised society with lots of powerful forces. These laws are your check and balance that means an individual can come forward – these mechanisms have been set up because of establishment cover-ups,” she said.

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Without the False Claims Act, labs are unlikely to confess integrity breaches. In the UK, for instance, awareness of wrongdoing at institutions will only emerge in cases where researchers have resigned and brought a tribunal case against their former employer or are themselves being sued by institutions – both of which are unlikely scenarios.

Reich’s��office is occasionally contacted by UK-based scientists but, apart from notifying research funders, there are few meaningful avenues to expose integrity breaches, she said.

“In the UK I’ve seen more stonewalling and locking down the information,” she said, adding that the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) lacks statutory powers to intervene in institutional investigations.

“You might say the US system is also ineffective but we do have these legal mechanisms. So if UKRIO was working, or if institutions were effective [at investigating integrity breaches], I’d be less concerned but I’m unaware of where people can turn in the UK unless to the media,” she said.

That said, the UK and US media’s lack of appetite for research integrity stories, which can incur significant legal costs, was why Reich left journalism for the law, she explained.

“I was a science journalist from 2000 until 2015 and it was around 2005 when we started seeing fraud allegations appearing online after the Schön case,” said Reich, referring to the scientific fraud conducted by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön that was exposed in 2002.

“It was the first time that someone had cross-compared articles using electronic accessibility to articles. If someone was repurposing data in the 90s, you’d have had to pull them off a library shelf and have the stacks there to compare,” she explained.

“It’s fair to say I was there at the start of allegations breaking through electronic access to information and we had a kind of sweet spot where institutions would respond fast,” she explained. However, the ubiquity of online allegations by 2011 led to a “new approach” among institutions which, Reich contends, reasoned “we don’t have to address that because it’s on the internet”.

“I felt boxed in. I would try to understand ‘why aren’t they acting on this allegation? The evidence is out there.’ But the institution didn’t seem embarrassed enough to address it, because there’s so much noise online that they can hide behind that,” she explained.

“I ended up taking myself seriously and going to law school because I wanted to represent people,” she said, setting up her own firm in 2023 which now employs two other lawyers speaking to whistleblowers.

However, other legal firms are now taking an interest in the False Claims Act in relation to research fraud, said Reich on what was once her near-unique specialism around research integrity breaches.

“There’s probably between half a dozen and a dozen lawyers interested in this work compared to maybe one in 2023, apart from me,” she said.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com��