An adult stem cell project which he was supervising has been scrapped after an audit in November last year found that a scientist's progress reports did not match his lab records. Although Professor Trounson is not under investigation -- it must be stressed -- he was the principal investigator and apparently did sign the doubtful report.

The researcher in question has left the university. He was a senior member of a team working on a lung regeneration project which was attempting to use adult mesenchymal stem cells to regenerate lung tissue to treat cystic fibrosis. It had received A$1.2 million funding over 18 months from the Australian Stem Cell Centre.

"People sort of touching up their gels -- things like that are a lot easier now than it used to be," Tim Hunt of Cancer Research UK told the journal Cell. "There's a bell curve with absolutely exemplary practice at one end and misconduct at the other and a big bell in the middle representing degrees of questionable practice. How do we address that? How do we ensure that people don't slide down one side of the bell into the misconduct side?"

One response to the problem is increased ethical training for young scientists. But a study by Melissa Anderson, of the University of Minnesota, suggests that this could sometimes be worse than useless. Formal instruction, it turns out, significantly increases the odds of poor choices when collecting and analysing data, dealing with confidential information or allowing inappropriate influence by funding organisations. It is also correlated with a higher probability of not giving proper credit to others.

How about mentoring? Mentoring in research and ethics decreases the likelihood of misconduct, but advice on how to survive in the field and use funds actually increases it. Of the younger scientists in Dr Anderson's survey, biologists were among the least likely to be mentored in ethics -- they received more advice about getting funding.

Watson is no stranger to controversy. He is well-known for supporting selective abortions, denigrating a female colleague whose work helped him to win his Nobel, sexist remarks, contempt for "stupid people", support for human reproductive cloning, backing genetic engineering, and so. This time, however, he touched a particularly raw nerve.

A long interview with the Sunday Times included this unnerving paragraph: "He says that he is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours ­ whereas all the testing says not really', and I know that this 'hot potato' is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true'."

Dr Grompe acknowledges that his position places him in a dilemma. "I have found myself in a conflict between my philosophical convictions on the one hand and the desire to exploit pluripotent stem cells for research and clinical applications on the other. I have also found myself in the cross fire in the public debate between the pro-ES cell and anti-ES cell camps."

Dr Grompe's qualms are not religious, but philosophical in the Aristotelian tradition. The soul, he says, is "the unifying principle of its formation or organisation". The concept expresses the idea that "something more than the material from which it is constructed governs the nature of a being".

To negotiate a way forward, he supports alternative methods for producing pluripotent human stem cells which are nearly identical to embryo-derived stem cells. One such method is directly reprogramming adult cells back to a pluripotent state. This has already been proven in mice, but Dr Grompe feels that there are serious problems with reprogramming human cells at the moment. Another is altered nuclear transfer. This has been ridiculed by many scientists, but Dr Grompe feels that it could be "a powerful experimental system for studying reprogramming factors".

Both sides of the stem cell debate have been guilty of "half-truths, exaggeration and outright disinformation", he says. The pro-ES cell side has engaged in "public campaigns that have twisted scientific fact in sometimes grotesque ways". The anti-ES cell side has touted the virtues of adult stem cells unrealistically.

For non-scientists, the term "knock-out mice" may sound cartoonish, but it is an immensely powerful technology which is being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine -- from basic research to the development of new therapies. Using techniques developed by Capecchi and Smithies, scientists can disable, or knock-out, specific genes. This helps scientists to establish what these genes do.

Martin Evans's contribution was to use mouse embryonic stem cells to create strains of mice which inherit an altered genome. They have become commonplace in studies of embryonic development, adult physiology, ageing and disease. To date, more than 10,000 mouse genes -- about half the genome -- have been knocked out. Scientists expect that the whole genome will soon be mapped.

According to the Times, advertising for mom jobs "seeks to pathologise the postpartum body, characterising pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring after-effects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae."