This month, a trial began at the Munich District Court that has been widely reported in the media and which, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, concerns ‘one of the biggest science thrillers of the post-war period’. The defendant is said to have initiated a plagiarism intrigue against the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at LMU Munich, Matthias Graw. In the ongoing trial, he is charged with forgery, fraud, copyright infringement, and defamation.
In July 2022, several newspapers reported on serious allegations of plagiarism against Graw. According to independent judgements by the well-known ‘plagiarism hunters’ Stefan Weber and Martin Heidingsfelder, Graw’s doctoral dissertation, which he submitted to the University of Hamburg in 1987, was plagiarised almost completely from a paper published in 1982 in an anthology titled ‘Colchicine – 100 Years of Research’, a volume comprising the proceedings of a conference in Romania. The plagiarism hunters sent their reports to the ombudsman for good scientific practice and the dean’s office of the Medical Faculty at the University of Hamburg, who were tasked with investigating the case.
Graw had to face the suspicions against him for several weeks. Then the case took a spectacular turn. At the beginning of October, the ombudsman of the University of Hamburg announced that the book from which Graw had allegedly copied his thesis was a fake. Several observations clearly indicated that it was not from the early 1980s and in fact much younger than Graw’s dissertation. For one thing, the bibliography of the volume included a publication from 1983 – one year after the book allegedly had been published. Moreover, several mistakes and inconsistencies were found in the imprint.
The CSMC’s Artefact Lab was involved in the analyses that ultimately led to Graw’s exoneration, investigating in particular the paper and binding of the book. They provided important insights that were incorporated into the ombudsman’s overall assessment and ultimately led to the conclusion that the volume was a fake. The researchers found no signs of age-related oxidation on the book covers or in the paper used, as would have been expected in a 40-year-old book. The smoking gun, however, was the chemical composition of the book’s paper. It was found to be of an industrial standard that was only established in the states of the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It contained synthetic adhesives and calcium carbonate, and was not glued with alum and rosin, two chemical substances that promote acidification and have therefore largely disappeared from industrial paper production. In the Eastern Bloc, this change only started to be implemented after 1989, long after the book had supposedly been printed.
Apparently with the intention of ruining Graw professionally, someone had put together the 350-page anthology – including 13 scientific articles and a foreword by the Romanian dictator’s wife Elena Ceaușescu – with remarkable meticulousness. After the ombudsman made their findings public in October 2022, several news media, in particular the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as one of the plagiarism hunters, who publicly admitted his error, gathered further evidence in favour of the forgery hypothesis and thus contributed to the clarification of the case. In consequence, the suspicion of fraud was no longer directed at Graw, but at the person who had commissioned the plagiarism hunters and who had provided them with the obscure Romanian book. He is now standing trial at the Munich District Court. Clarifying the backgrounds of the affair is the subject of the ongoing proceedings.