Wang Gang · Full chronicle and history

On September 29, 2026, The Beijing News learned from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University that Wang Gang, a professor and doctoral supervisor at the College of Plant Protection, has officially left his post. The Human Resources Office confirmed that his departure is directly related to the retraction of a Nature paper, and the university is negotiating with him over the return of talent subsidies and other payments.

Academic fraud-exposing blogger Geng Tongxue released a video pointing out that a rice immunity research paper, with Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University professor Wang Gang as co-first author, has problems including duplicated data, anomalous values, and repeated images; the corresponding author is Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Wang Ertao.

Corresponding author Wang Ertao acknowledged on PubPeer that the source data contained duplicate values and anomalies, and that some images were duplicated. He proactively contacted the editorial office of Nature to apply for retraction, stating that the problematic data was generated by first author Wang Gang, and that original records could not be found for some of the data. The retraction process is scheduled to be completed in August 2026.