Scientific fraud  is a serious problem. In 2009, Daniele Fanelli from the University of Edinburgh analysed the results of several surveys and showed that around 2 percent of scientists admit to having “fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once”. Worse still, around 14 percent of them claimed that their colleagues had done the same.

When cases of fraud and misconduct are discovered, it’s usually through the actions of whistleblowers–peers or partners who take on a big personal risk to out their unethical colleagues. In a new feature for Nature, I and three other writers explore three radically different scientific whistleblowers to try and understand why (and how) they do what they do.

I profiled Uri Simonsohn, a