小中大上文的详细内容：
Science 22 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5930, p. 997
DOI: 10.1126/science.324_997
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News of the Week
China:
Appearances Can Deceive, Even With Standard Reagents
Hao Xin*
* With reporting by Xu Zhiguo of Science News in Beijing.
Culturing immortalized human cell lines for microRNA studies had been a routine procedure in Xi Jianzhong's lab at Peking University. Then last June, something went wrong. Time after time, black spots appeared in the flasks and the cells died within a week. Xi, a biomedical engineer, spent the rest of 2008 trying to figure out why his team's experiments were failing. He finally got a tip that a cell growth medium his lab was using—Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM)—might be bogus. "DMEM is so basic that we never suspected it could have problems," says Xi. Sure enough, after obtaining a fresh batch from a well-known distributor, the cell lines grew without a hitch.
China is infamous for cheap knockoffs of brand-name consumer goods. Now many scientists are discovering to their dismay that a cottage industry of faux biochemical reagents has sprung up to take advantage of China's hefty increases in R&D funding. Scientists who until recently worked overseas are especially vulnerable because they may not know which dealers to trust, Xi says. "More and more researchers are returning to China. We don't want them to waste time and money like we did," says Huang Yanyi, who like Xi is a returnee in Peking University's biomedical engineering department.
After Xi learned that many colleagues had also been victimized but kept quiet about their experiences, he contacted ScienceNet.cn, a Web site for China's scientific community. In an online survey conducted with the biweekly magazine Science News, more than half of the nearly 500 respondents reported run-ins with fake reagents, according to results posted on ScienceNet.cn on 29 April.
Exposing scams may not prevent them. Currently, no Chinese agency regulates research reagents, except those used for medical tests. A database kept by Lab-on-web (cuturl('www.bioon.com.cn')) lists more than 500 reagent dealers in China; many are small operations claiming to be distributors of foreign products. The Web site has also published the names of unscrupulous dealers.
Legitimate companies say there is little they can do about the bad apples. "It is a widespread concern throughout the life science and other industries in China," says Johnson Ho, president for Greater China at Life Technologies, based in Foster City, California. Invitrogen, a division of Life Technologies, discovered that some of its products had been counterfeited. It has created a list of authorized distributors (cuturl('www.invitrogen.com/site/us/en/home/Global/Contact-Us/RegionalContactUs/China.html')). Ho suggests customers buy only from distributors on the list.
Earlier this year, Xi confronted the Beijing-based distributor who sold his lab the false DMEM. The dealer challenged Xi to prove his case. Xi called Invitrogen's office in Shanghai, which on 20 March dispatched representative Ju Jun to Xi's lab to examine the DMEM. At first glance, the packages looked genuine, but a search in Invitrogen's database by lot number, which anyone can do on the company's Web site, revealed that one lot number did not exist, and a second had an expiration date that was different from that stated on the fake DMEM's package.
Counterfeits are not limited to Invitrogen products. In recent years, others have reported fake enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits and ovalbumin products. More than time or money may be at stake, says Huang. If Chinese researchers were to publish spurious results because of fake reagents, he says, "we could lose our credibility as scientists."
很严肃的事情，希望只是个案而不会真的已经这么严重~
