From the main entrance of Huazhong Agricultural University (hereinafter referred to as Huanong) to the comprehensive building where the School of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine is located, it takes three and a half minutes to drive. The university has the broadest territory among Wuhan universities, with commercial streets, tunnels, and traffic lights on campus, like a small town. Perhaps because the end of the semester is approaching, the campus is not bright at night, shrouded in the half-dim dimness of the street lights.
Zhang Li came to see me through such a commotion. When I first contacted him, he was hoarse and asked if the interview could be as brief as possible. As the student in question who was interviewed with his real name at that time, Zhang Li received ** intensively in those days. He is in the final year of his Ph.D. career and is the oldest of the 11 students. On Weibo, many netizens called him "Big Brother".
The degree of fermentation of the reported incident on the Internet obviously exceeded the expectations of the senior brother and the younger brothers and sisters, and Huazhong Agricultural University, a university with not too much public popularity, became the focus of heated discussions for a while. This afternoon, I went to the fourth teaching building of Huanong. Zhang Li said on social ** that when he decided to report, he felt uncertain about his future and wanted to say sorry to himself who was endorsing in the corridors of the three teachings and four teachings as an undergraduate. It is also in this teaching building that there was a large ** of the famous teacher Huang Feiruo. After the incident, many people inside and outside the school came here to check in, and some people even took a photo of themselves and Huang Feiruo** and posted it on the Internet.
This is a U-shaped teaching building, and on two symmetrical corridors, several students are endorsing the rare winter sunshine. Maybe they are also like Zhang Li that day, they want to win a good future with their hard work. Climbing up to the 4th floor, I followed the signs on the network ** to find the wall. Huang Feiruo's ** has been taken down, leaving no trace on the wall.
More imprints are apparently less easily erased. When reporting the report, the 11 students attached a 125-page PDF document, detailing and explaining the falsifications in a number of articles that Huang Feiruo supervised or served as the corresponding author. It's a well-prepared battle, and students are trying to shake up opponents who are much stronger than themselves in the current academic system.
The student signs the report letter and presses his fingerprint. Screenshot of the source.
Before becoming an opponent, Huang Feiruo's image was that of a teacher who took the initiative to extend an olive branch to his students. Zhang Li remembers that Huang Feiruo found him in his senior year and said that his laboratory had a lot of achievements, and the students all found high-paying jobs after graduation. Huang Feiruo is a professor, doctoral supervisor, and head of the Department of Animal Nutrition and Feed Science, and has taught Zhang Li. Based on his trust in his teacher, Zhang Li chose him as his mentor in 2018 when he was sent to a master's and doctoral program. After 5 long years, Zhang Li now sighed: My academic path has been blocked by him (Huang Feiruo). 」
Zhang Li's face behind his glasses was a little tired. He didn't want to recall the details of studying under Huang Feiruo, and the story was condensed into several key nodes in his telling: when he was just a graduate student, he found that the laboratory that doubled as a study room was only about 20 square meters, the environment was simple, and there was no basic experimental equipment, and the major of animal science needed to do a lot of experiments. Huang Feiruo explained that he will move to a new building soon, and it will be fine when the time comes. After moving to the fourth complex, there is an independent study room, and the laboratory is more spacious and bright than before, but the experimental equipment is still not solved.
At the master's level, Zhang Li rarely came into contact with experiments, and the journals he published were also of a review nature, which discussed and evaluated existing research, and did not need to do experiments. Although he had doubts about the tutor's teaching method, Zhang Li did not dare to say anything as a master's student. When I entered the PhD stage, I was exposed to more and more things, and I knew that there was a problem.
How to detect that there is a problem, another doctoral student, Huang Lu, later said more specifically. They found that no one was doing experiments in the laboratory, but the detailed data was constantly being produced. The lab doesn't even have an analytical balance – some professionals use the analogy that an internet company doesn't have wifi. Huang Lu needed to weigh samples for experiments, so he had to go to other laboratories to borrow balances. When she signed the borrowing register, she found that it was full of records of equipment borrowed by her tutor's students. It's a shame. 」
A student in the group did an experiment of pig feed, and planned to feed the pigs with a specific feed that he had prepared to observe the changes before and after. Because of the large scale of the experiment, the mentor is needed to help contact the appropriate farm. Soon Huang Feiruo said at the meeting that the pigs had been fed. The student felt strange, the feed formula was still in his hands, and he had not submitted a detailed feeding experiment plan, how could the pigs be fed? After a while, Huang Feiruo also said that because of African swine fever, all 560 pigs on the farm died.
The students didn't dare to question Huang Feiruo in person, but they were talking in private: This is too exaggerated, right? Gradually, this suspicion became a secret to most of the students in the lab.
As a senior brother, Zhang Li was tormented for the longest time by the idea of suspecting his mentor of academic fraud. He once confided in his friend, who advised him to endure it, and the most important thing was to get his degree. He also thought about dropping out of school and preparing to return to his hometown with his bachelor's degree.
Withdrawal requires the signature of the tutor, which is obviously not a good path. At the dinner table and in the study room at night, some ideas slowly gathered among the students until everyone felt that it was urgent. I have to face so many false things, and I have to cooperate with them to act every time I have a meeting, which is very painful. Huang Lu recalled the mood at that time.
I just want to have a few fewer victims. Zhang Li said. They don't just want to pull themselves out of the mire, they also want future students to be harmed.
Zhang Li's speech on Weibo. Screenshot of the source.
The day after I met Zhang Li, I entered the Huanong Complex. The complex is new and bright, and you need to swipe the access card to enter and exit. After walking around the building, I found a small unlocked door at the back. The School of Veterinary Medicine is on the 3rd to 6th floors of this building, and I would like to see if I can find more interviewees.
This is an H-shaped building, with 7 areas of ABCDEFG on each floor, including offices, laboratories, study rooms, etc., and a name sign is hung at each door to indicate the purpose.
On the 5th floor, I found Huang Feiruo's laboratory. The information on the name plate shows that this is a laboratory shared by Huang Feiruo and another teacher, and the person in charge of safety is Huang Feiruo, with a mobile phone number written below. Over the next few days, I called the number several times, and unsurprisingly no one answered. Huang Feiruo's office is diagonally opposite the laboratory, and the name tag is still there, but it is obviously impossible for him, who has been suspended, to appear in the office at this time.
The name brand of Huang Feiruo's laboratory. Photo source: Roland.
The whole afternoon was in vain. At about 9 o'clock in the evening, Zhang Li appeared in the corridor on the 5th floor, followed by ** students and entered the laboratory together. My guess is that these are the students involved in the report – Zhang Li once told me that recently, 11 of their classmates had recently gotten together for a meeting almost every day to discuss the progress of the incident. I waited outside the lab, wanting to talk to students other than Zhang Li when they came out. The day before, Zhang Li said that none of the other 10 students would be interviewed. But as a reporter, I always want to know more.
An hour later, the students streamed out of the lab. Zhang Li was a little surprised to see me, and immediately introduced to the other students: This is the author of Characters. The students looked at me and at each other, and they all had a shy smile on their faces. A girl in a black down jacket said, "She was here when we went in just now, and we waited for a long time." Capturing the kindness in her tone, I struck up a conversation with the girl and learned that her name was Huang Lu and she was in her second year of PhD.
While Huang Lu and I were talking, the other students were all around her. It can be seen that they do not want to leave the people in the group alone. Students in the midst of turmoil choose to respond to the outside world with caution and unity.
Two days later, at a convenience store in front of Huanong, I met Huang Lu, who had come as promised. She is calm and graceful, and speaks clearly. From Huang Lu's narration, more details are presented——
Similar to Zhang Li, Huang Lu entered Huanong as an undergraduate, took Huang Feiruo's classes, and also believed in Huang Feiruo's self-boasting when choosing a graduate supervisor. After starting graduate school, Huang Lu found that she did very few experiments, and was arranged by Huang Feiruo to read literature most of the time. Huang Lu studied very hard, and applied for the national college student innovation and entrepreneurship training program as an undergraduate, and often soaked in the laboratory. In graduate school, there were fewer experiments, and she was a little puzzled, and she felt that maybe her level was not enough.
At the Ph.D. level, things haven't changed much. The second Ph.D. wanted to determine the topic of graduation, Huang Lu was called to the office by Huang Feiruo, and gave her a few key words bile acids, acetylation, and epigenetics, and asked her to search for them. Huang Lu didn't find any useful information, Huang Feiruo searched on it for a while, pointed to an article and said to Huang Lu: This topic has a beginning. After a few minutes before and after, Huang Lu's doctor's ** topic was determined.
Huang Feiruo's first topic for Huang Lu is to use mangosteen alcohol to regulate the secretion of bile acids in pregnant sows, thereby affecting the production performance of sows. Mangosteen is a compound that was first found in the fruit of Garcinia bogia. Huang Feiruo was once regarded as an expert in mangosteen research, and a search on CNKI found that 7 masters and doctors have completed mangosteen-related ** under the guidance of Huang Feiruo.
Huang Lu set out to design the experimental protocol, which required more than 200 gestation sows and a large amount of mangosteen. In 2022, Huang Feiruo asked Huang Lu to contact him to buy Garcinia cambogia and then refine mangosteen alcohol from it. Although Huang Lu knew that it would be difficult to extract enough mangosteen alcohol for testing concentration under the conditions of the laboratory, she still followed the teacher's instructions to look around for a suitable seller. Just contacted a seller in Yunnan, Huang Feiruo said that he had already contacted a certain company, planted hundreds of catties of large-leaved Garcinia cambogia, and the company also had a modern extraction line, so Huang Lu didn't have to worry about it.
Like the more than 500 dead pigs, these hundreds of catties of large-leaved Garcinia cambogia have always only existed in Huang Feiruo's words.
In the two years of her Ph.D., in addition to doing some small-scale experiments, Huang Lu was either helping Huang Feiruo write all kinds of materials assigned by the school, or writing a review according to Huang Feiruo's requirements. But no matter how she wrote and changed it, Huang Feiruo was not satisfied, and criticized her in front of everyone at the group meeting for having no mental state at all. Huang Lu reported his experimental plan, Huang Feiruo always said impatiently, don't report this, I won't be able to read it for a while, you go to a few senior brothers to discuss.
There are hierarchies in the lab. When talking to the two postdocs, Huang Feiruo called the students Zhang Li and Huang Lu "the people below", and even said so in front of them. He also said to Huang Lu to let the people below do it, referring to the students who are lower than Huang Lu. Anyway, it's layer by layer. 」
Now the people below are united. Huang Lu said.
Reports are made both on-campus and online. On the afternoon of January 16, after sending the real-name joint reporting letter and supporting materials online, 11 students went to the college to submit the reporting materials.
Huang Lu remembered that when she walked on the road that day, everyone was in a super tragic mood. From time to time, it is said that keep up and get closer. Eleven people gathered in heaps, leaning on each other and moving forward.
In order to collect evidence, they spent more than a month. Huang Feiruo's academic fraud is almost certain, after all, the students have seen all kinds of weirdness in the laboratory. A master's student who participated in the report disclosed on social ** that in November 2022, Huang Feiruo asked himself to write an experimental article, which was supervised by a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory. Since some of the experimental results were not significant, after Huang Feiruo communicated with the postdoctoral fellow, the postdoctoral fellow directly revised the results, which shocked the master's students. After the review comments came back, the postdoc also asked the master's student to draw a drawing by himself to make up part of the data, but the master's student did not do so, and finally the manuscript was rejected.
When they first started looking for evidence, the students thought that the evidence must exist, but it would take a very detailed search to find it. It's like making sure there's something in the room, it's been carefully hidden, and you have to be patient to find it.
But when they put out a thick stack of dozens of master's and doctoral degrees** and journals ** for which Huang Feiruo served as the corresponding author, they found that the things were lying on the floor of the room** after dividing the division of labor.
Inside the laboratory. Photo source: Roland.
Among these **, there are western blot results of mice directly transferred to pig blotting results, there are two different substances added to pig feed mangosteen alcohol and enbeic acid, but the experimental results are completely consistent, and there are 3 people who feed laying hens with different substances, and the data obtained are exactly the same.
I didn't expect the way of counterfeiting to be so clumsy. Huang Lu still remembers everyone's shock at that time. They are also becoming more and more confident, and no one has wavered in the more than a month of collecting, collating and summarizing evidence. During the day, there were other students in the study room on the 6th floor, and the students waited until the evening to concentrate on their actions. And all this, Huang Feiruo, who works on the 5th floor one floor away, was completely unaware.
With confidence in the ironclad evidence, 11 students went to the college to hand out a paper real-name joint report letter. The signatures of the 11 people are at the bottom of the letter, and each name is stamped with a red fingerprint. They didn't know what was waiting for them, and someone had even packed their bags and was ready to leave at any time before going to the academy.
* Rapid fermentation. Many netizens praised the students for their youthful enthusiasm, but the people involved suffered great fear after the tragedy.
On the night the report was submitted, several students gathered in a conference room. Huang Lu suddenly saw through the transparent glass door that Huang Feiruo was walking towards the conference room. Almost reflexively, Huang Lu immediately turned around and turned his back to the door. She couldn't see Huang Feiruo's expression, she only heard him walk in, and said lightly: It's okay, let's solve things together, just say whatever you want, this is also a step for me to take good students in the future. Then leave. In the dead silence, a girl cried out in fright.
Huang Lu also felt terrible. He's still swaggering here, walking around, feeling fearless. We're afraid, isn't that a big deal? 」
That was the last time the students saw Huang Feiruo. On January 18, Huang Feiruo said to ** that the report was untrue, and some students took the lead in threatening others to report it together. Zhang Li joked on social platforms: This response can't help but remind me of your clumsiness when you fabricated data. The next day, Huanong announced that if Huang Fei was preliminarily determined to have academic misconduct, he would be suspended from his post and classes, and a tutor group would be set up to be fully responsible for the training of graduate students in the research group.
Students who have achieved initial victories also have to face the flaws of their academic careers. Zhang Li said that he wanted to completely cut off the previous scientific research topic, and when he reported it, he knew that this meant that he would definitely not be able to graduate on time, but he was willing to bear the price; You can do it all over again. Huang Lu feels that this is much better than carrying the psychological burden of fraud forever.
By the time I walked out of the convenience store after the interview, it was completely dark. Seeing Huang Lu's figure disappear into the campus, I thought that the students had done what they thought they should do, and what I should do was to try to find more information.
Entering the complex again, I knocked on the office door opposite Huang Feiruo's lab. As soon as the two male teachers heard my intention, they said that they would not accept interviews. After a while, several staff members surrounded me in the corner of the hallway, saying that they were screening for outside salesmen, and that only teachers and students from Huanong could enter the building. A staff member escorted me downstairs to leave while asking the others to hurry up and check if the doors were locked.
Ten days after I left Wuhan, on February 6, Huanong reported that after investigation, Huang Feiruo had falsified and tampered with experimental data and **, improper signature, and dereliction of duty and responsibility in guiding students, and Huang Feiruo was dismissed from all positions in the school and terminated his employment contract. One of Huang Feiruo's previous positions in the university was a member of the Academic Ethics Construction Committee of the School of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine.
After the announcement of the briefing, Huang Lu did not reply to me asking her how she felt. She recalled her and her comrades-in-arms when they applied for Huang Feiruo's graduate school on social platforms, saying that the past is dark and untraceable, and the road to the future is bright. The updates of other students are also saying goodbye to the past and ending this special experience.