Guangming Xiong poured a cup of piping hot tea from his favourite, porcelain teapot, a ritual he repeated every day in the laboratory at Germany's Giessen University where he worked as a microbiologist. But instead of refreshing him, this cup of tea almost killed him, bringing on a severe bout of dizziness that led to his admission to intensive care that evening.
The doctors soon established that Xiong's tea had been laced with a potentially fatal overdose of digitoxin, a medicine usually prescribed for heart disease. Prosecutors have charged Volker Mocek, a 37-year-old university colleague, with attempted murder. They claim Mocek faked data in his doctoral thesis and feared that he was about to be rumbled by the Chinese scientist.
The case has highlighted the problem of cheating in scientific research and the lengths to which ambitious researchers will go to cover up their misconduct. According to Ralf Zander, a professor of medicine in the southern German city of Mainz, academics are slow to voice criticism of colleagues' methods, even if irregularities are obvious.
"Everybody assesses everyone else's work at some stage. You don't harm one another because you might need each other some time," he says.
Few research frauds ever come to light, and the German Research Society recorded only five cases of manipulation of data between 1987 and 1997. The most spectacular case hit the headlines two years ago when a former assistant revealed that one of Germany's leading cancer researchers, Professor Friedhelm Herrmann, had been manipulating or inventing data for years.
Most scientists who fake data are motivated by simple, professional ambition but a growing number are driven by the pursuit of huge profits available from the pharmaceutical industry. Thousands of researchers have abandoned academic life in recent years to found small, biotechnology companies.
These tiny firms, which have long been the darlings of the stock exchange, develop new drugs, treatments and processes which they hope to sell to big pharmaceutical companies. But, although drug companies corporations have paid millions to such companies, very few ideas devised by biotech firms ever reach the market. Their failure, according to one German pharmaceutical company executive who declined to be named, is often due to inadequate or faulty research data.
"It's so easy for these people to fake results at an early stage of development and to create small, skewed clinical trials that you often only discover the problem when you set up a large-scale, properly monitored trial. By then, you've spent millions on a product that doesn't work and could never have worked," she says.
Mocek's area of specialisation was genetic research, perhaps the most exciting field of scientific inquiry today. He claimed to have developed a new system for decoding genetic information by displaying radioactive markings on X-ray film.
The veterinary scientist's professors were so impressed with his findings that they gave him a doctorate magna cum laude. There the matter might have rested but for the awkward questions posed by Xiong, who discovered contradictions in the doctoral thesis and suspected that the data was faulty.
Soon after Xiong voiced his anxieties, curious things began to happen at the lab. One night, a number of gas taps were opened while a Bunsen burner was on - a sure recipe for an explosion if the lab's ventilation had not been so good.
Shortly afterwards, there was an arson attack on the library and in a series of unexplained thefts, Mocek's lab diary and research materials were stolen, along with notes kept by his supervisor.
A university investigation last year established that Mocek had indeed falsified data, and he was stripped of his doctorate and fired from his job at the university. He denies attempting to poison Xiong, and his lawyer, Ramazan Schmidt, claims that others may have had a stronger motive to murder the Chinese scientist.
"In murder cases, the perpetrator is often related to the victim - close relations or wives could at least be considered. That's a point the investigators have ignored completely until now," he says.
Xiong's wife claims that she saw Mocek in the lab shortly before her husband drank from the poisoned cup and it is her testimony that made him the chief suspect. But Schmidt believes that, instead of focusing exclusively on his client, investigators should examine more closely the wife's possible motives. "She was the person who first accused my client but she has never been questioned herself," he says.
A court has ordered prosecutors to broaden their investigation before a decision is taken on whether to bring Mocek to trial. Unusually for a man accused of attempted murder, the scientist has never been held in jail and the court has placed no restrictions on his movements.
Schmidt is confident that if the case comes to trial his client will be acquitted, and he says that although the investigation has taken its toll on Mocek, he is slowly getting his life back together. "He is working as a vet in an ordinary practice now. He never really wanted a career in academic life anyway," he says.