Episode 63: India steps up fight against research misconduct

Host: Subhra Priyadarshini; Sound editing: Prince George

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Hello and welcome to This Week in India’s Science. I’m Subhra Priyadarshini.

Four big stories this episode — why rising paper retractions are forcing national reform, a potential region-specific solution for snakebite treatment, India’s sprint into biofoundries, and why a strange sequence of solar eruptions lit up Ladakh in red auroras last year.

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First up, a large analysis of retractions over 40 years places India third globally for life-science paper retractions. The menace is rising. Part of the reason that the National Institutional Ranking Framework will now count retractions in its university rankings — and penalise institutions with persistently high numbers.

Co-author of the life sciences retraction study Sabuj Bhattacharyya, a research-integrity officer at inStem in Bengaluru offers a crucial corrective:

Sabuj Bhattacharyya: Retractions are not just a red flag for misconduct — they’re a mirror to our broken systems of oversight, training, and ethical review. Without structural reform, we’ll keep mistaking the symptom for the disease.

That complexity is important. The team found nearly a quarter of India-linked retractions stemmed from ethical or regulatory non-compliance — not always deliberate fabrication. The concern among experts is that blunt penalties could discourage honest corrections or lead universities to bury problems rather than fix them. A single retraction for honest error, for instance, should not carry the same weight as a pattern of misconduct.

Ivan Oransky: I think any any sanction or metric can lead to unintended consequences. It's certainly not a bad idea to, you know, shine the spotlight on problematic behavior that's leading to retractions and in the short term, if that means counting retractions, that's reasonable.

That’s Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch.

Ivan Oransky: On the other hand, a retractions don't happen automatically. So universities can, you know, block retractions, or at least delay retractions. Universities could threaten to sue publishers and if they retract papers from their faculty. And unfortunately, a lot of publishers react badly to risk like that, and so they might delay or even avoid retracting. So I think that's a real risk. I also think that a better solution would be to stop focusing so much on publications and citations and go way upstream, because that's why this happens.

This decision reflects awareness, which is a positive. What it doesn't do is attack the problem at its source. 'Publish or perish' is real all over the world, even here in the US, but It is particularly pernicious in countries that are trying to accelerate their growth and their rankings.

So what’s the path forward? Bhattacharyya and others argue for multi-level reform: robust Research Integrity Offices at national and institutional levels, structured training starting in undergraduate programmes, and machine-readable registries so retracted work is visible and downstream citations can be traced.

Sabuj Bhattacharyya: We need to move beyond punishment and build a true integrity infrastructure, which basically means having trained research integrity officers, functioning ethics committees, and real consequences for institutions that look the other way.

If India wants a global research footprint it can be proud of, infrastructure and incentives need to match that ambition — from ethical review to training, and from transparent databases to protection for whistleblowers.

Read a news explainer I put together for Nature India this week.

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Now here’s a story that could change thousands of lives. India has relied on horse-derived antivenoms for more than a century — lifesaving, yes, but slow, bulky, and often mismatched to regionally varying venoms. Now, researchers in India and the UK have shown that small molecule drugs — repurposed enzyme inhibitors — can fully protect mice from Russell’s viper venom.

The study tested three drugs: varespladib — which blocks phospholipase A2, a venom enzyme that rips apart cell membranes; marimastat — a metalloprotease inhibitor originally developed for cancer; and nafamostat, which blocks serine proteases. The punchline: varespladib and marimastat together neutralised venom across diverse populations, and in many cases one drug alone was enough. The team even delayed giving the drugs by 30 minutes after the bite — and still saved every animal.

Kartik Sunagar of IISc Bengaluru, the paper’s corresponding author, put it plainly.

Kartik Sunagar: An effective solution for Russell’s viper envenoming would essentially solve India’s snakebite problem.

Russell’s viper is implicated in more than half of the country’s estimated 58,000 snakebite deaths each year.

What makes this work especially important is the geographic mapping. Venom composition varies from West Bengal to Rajasthan; West Bengal venoms needed both drugs, Rajasthan’s could be neutralised by varespladib alone. As venom biologist Sunandan Das told us: What this shows is that enzyme interactions in the venom can be surprisingly interdependent. In some cases, blocking one enzyme renders the other ineffective.

Why does all this matter? Antivenoms require cold storage, hospital infrastructure and are made by immunising horses with a small set of venoms — which means they don’t always match local snake populations. Small molecule inhibitors are stable, portable, and—crucially—modular. [Beats end] The researchers say the approach lets you add or remove inhibitors depending on snake species and region — something conventional antivenoms can’t do.

The next step is human trials. The team is already in talks with the Indian Council of Medical Research. Challenges remain — dose selection, safety in humans, delivery routes — but this could become a field-deployable stopgap that buys victims hours, even days, until they get to a clinic.

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From life-saving drugs to high-speed labs.

India is building a network of biofoundries — highly automated facilities that programme microbes to make fuels, cosmetics and specialty chemicals. The new public biofoundry at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in Delhi uses automation and AI to run the classic DBTL loop — Design, Build, Test, Learn — at scale.

Syed Shams Yazdani, head of the synthetic biology group at ICGEB. summed it up with a line that’s already getting quoted:

Syed Shams Yazdani: It’s like designing your dream car. Only here, the chassis are microbes.

Robots assemble genetic circuits, test dozens of microbial strains in parallel, and feed results into machine learning models that refine the next design. What used to take months now takes weeks.

Taslimarif Saiyed from C-CAMP highlights why biofoundries matter.

Taslimarif Saiyed: Biofoundries help avoid product stagnation and attract investment in new bio-based technologies.

The Chennai biofoundry at IIT Madras, for instance, is already working on animal-free production of ingredients like hyaluronic acid and building strains that can valorise agricultural waste such as lignin.

But speed raises questions. India lacks enough trained strain-engineers, process-biologists and biofoundry operators. And regulation needs to catch up — new capabilities mean new biosafety and biosecurity considerations. The labs promise huge industrial opportunity, but to realise it we need practical training programmes and rules that protect people and the environment without stifling innovation.

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On 10 May 2024, skies over Ladakh burst into colour — auroras far south of their usual range. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics have now traced the cause: not a single solar blast, but a series of six coronal mass ejections that collided, merged and formed a complex magnetic structure on their way to Earth.

Using data from NASA and ESA spacecraft, the team found these CMEs interacted between 54 and 144 solar radii from the Sun. The structures at times resembled “two twisted magnetic braids wrapped together,” and when they arrived they carried shock and heat signatures that made this storm the most intense in two decades.

Why does this matter? These merged eruptions are harder to forecast than isolated events. They can amplify geomagnetic effects, disrupt power grids, scramble satellites and — as we saw — paint skies over the Himalaya. The researchers say continuous monitoring and improved heliospheric models are essential if we want better space-weather warnings.

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That’s our round up This Week in India’s Science. We heard about enzyme-blocking drugs that could change how snakebites are treated, hyper-efficient biofoundries reprogramming microbes, a rare solar storm that lit Ladakh, and hard questions about research integrity that India’s universities must answer. You will find links and full citations in the episode notes at www.nature.com/natindia/podcasts.

If you liked this episode, please subscribe, share, and tell us what you’d like to hear about. I’m Subhra Priyadarshini — thanks for listening. I’ll be back with more next week.