Financial improprieties, an oppressive workplace atmosphere, the obliteration of research findings, and the misappropriation of materials and tools have plagued the University of Copenhagen (KU) in Denmark.

On October 30, 2017, four researchers from Dr. Rune Linding's lab initiated legal action against KU for financial damages. A year later, police forwarded a case to the Danish Public Prosecutor concerning the theft of lab equipment and loss of research materials, data, and samples from Dr. Linding's lab. KU faces serious accusations! Through documents and discussions with anonymous sources familiar with the situation, I have uncovered a distressing narrative of administrative harassment, financial misconduct, and irretrievable research loss. As of this writing, KU has not provided comments.

Dr. Linding's research involves employing "big data" to analyze and predict biological system behaviors, aiming to forecast cellular activities with accuracy comparable to meteorological or aviation models. This scientific methodology holds numerous clinical applications, from understanding disease emergence to predicting treatment outcomes and developing new therapeutic strategies.

His lab has garnered funding from various sources, published over 60 scientific papers, created several publicly accessible research tools, and has been recognized in both popular and scientific media. Dr. Linding has also participated as an expert panelist for scientific webinars and served on the Editorial Board of Science Signaling.

Consequences for Achievement

Typically, securing a grant is a moment of joy. However, for Dr. Rune Linding, it was not the case. In 2013, he was awarded a grant of 20,103,232 DKK (~$3 million) from Innovation Fund Denmark for "MorphoMap," a four-year initiative aimed at identifying the biological networks facilitating cancer cell metastasis.

This project was multinational, involving laboratories from Denmark, Germany, and the US, with the Linding lab conducting the majority of the research. The lab of Dr. Janine Erler at KU was tasked with validation experiments using animal models and offered consultation for cell culture studies. Collaborators also included researchers from prestigious institutions such as Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It seemed to be a prime example of an international team tackling a critical health issue while training the next generation of scientists. However, the reality was starkly different.

Although Dr. Linding and Dr. Erler were married during the grant's inception and co-published research, their respective laboratories specialized in different cancer research areas and were situated at distinct institutions. Dr. Erler's lab was located at the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre (BRIC) within KU, while Dr. Linding's lab was in the Department of Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Tensions between Dr. Linding and Dr. Søren Brunak, the head of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, prompted DTU administration to request Dr. Linding step down as principal investigator, with Dr. Longden succeeding him. After consulting legal advisors, all parties consented to transfer the Linding lab to BRIC under Dr. Kristian Helin.

The transition seemed favorable, but in August 2014, when the lab was set to move to BRIC, there was no available lab space. Consequently, KU rented the Linding lab's space at DTU until the end of September 2017. This administrative change should have resolved the issues.

Regrettably, the lab's physical location remained problematic. Dr. Brunak designated Dr. Per Hägglund as an "overseer" for all instruments and equipment acquired by the Linding lab during its time at DTU. This led to immediate complications, as lab members could not authorize equipment maintenance. Emails from September 2014 stated that only Dr. Hägglund could make maintenance decisions, warning of "disciplinary actions" for unauthorized maintenance requests. This limitation, although meant for DTU-owned equipment, sparked conflicts regarding maintenance of equipment funded by the MorphoMap grant, which was not DTU property.

The precarious situation persisted for another year, compounded by ongoing maintenance issues and restricted access to shared equipment at DTU. As Dr. Longden prepared for an upcoming meeting with the funding agency in September 2015, he expressed concerns about the project’s continued difficulties in communicating with Dr. Helin. In his response, Dr. Helin threatened to inform the funding agency of potential project cessation, stating, "we have a couple of persons in the Linding lab who get fired the week after."

In 2016, Dr. Linding and Dr. Erler divorced. Dr. Linding sought to depart from BRIC due to the lab's distressing environment, his strained relationship with Dr. Erler, and the impending end of the rented space in September 2017. He aimed to relocate the lab to the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark under Dr. Eske Willerslev. Although part of KU, this museum operates under different administration and deans, physically distancing the lab from DTU. Scientifically, this center was an excellent match for the Linding lab’s projects, which utilize evolutionary conservation principles to examine complex human diseases. This appeared to be another ideal solution to both personal and professional dilemmas.

Uncovering Misappropriated Funds

During the process of reconciling funds for the move to the Natural History Museum, Dr. Longden discovered significant financial mismanagement totaling 3,755,519 DKK (over $500,000) in both approved and pending budgets for the MorphoMap grant. Financial records indicated that some of this misappropriation was used to cover salaries and purchase materials for unrelated projects in Dr. Erler's lab. Although she was a collaborator, none of these expenses were relevant to the MorphoMap project, and her lab produced no data for it. Additionally, misallocation by BRIC administrators failed to categorize certain charges correctly as overhead.

Dr. Longden reported these issues to the finance office, which subsequently restored some of the misused funds to the grant’s operating budget. However, this restoration did not include funds spent by the Erler lab on staff salaries, animals, or other lab materials. With no satisfactory resolution and time running out, Dr. Longden escalated the issue to Dean Ulla M. Wewer and the Chief Financial Officer of the Faculty of Health, who redirected the matter back to Dr. Helin. Dr. Helin's internal investigation concluded on September 11, 2017, that no financial mismanagement had occurred.

Despite the conclusion that funds were allocated correctly, Dr. Helin offered to return a small fraction of the misappropriated funds (600,000 DKK /$90,000) to the grant. Furthermore, Dr. Erler was to withdraw from the MorphoMap initiative. This decision was justified by citing "lack of progress" in the MorphoMap project, allowing the funds to be redirected to "related research" benefiting the Erler lab. This reasoning baffled the researchers responsible for the budget reporting to the funding agency.

Dr. Longden's distress over KU's response led him to contact the Ministry of Higher Education and Science (Minister Søren Pind) on September 18, 2017, suggesting that the department's conduct might indicate a pattern of fund misuse necessitating an investigation. Dr. Linding rejected the offer of partial fund restitution.

Devastation of a Laboratory

Within a week of refusing this offer, the lab could no longer continue its research activities. Officially, this was attributed to the conclusion of employment contracts and space rental. However, multiple interactions with administration and Dr. Longden did not clarify how materials, including cell lines, lab equipment, consumables, the supercomputer, and archived data, would be stored or transferred until the Linding lab could secure a new space. These resources were funded not only by the MorphoMap grant but also by other grants related to various Linding lab projects.

Mette Bjørnlund, an administrator at BRIC reporting directly to Dr. Helin, initiated actions against the lab. She froze all funding for the Linding lab, canceled the standing order for liquid nitrogen, denied the lab access to their data on KU servers, ordered the deletion of archived data, and took the lab's supercomputer offline.

Moreover, Ms. Bjørnlund effectively "stole" the equipment and research materials purchased with funds allocated to Dr. Linding, redistributing these items to other researchers at both DTU and BRIC. Lab members were left in a state of uncertainty. To make matters worse, she refused to transfer the contracts of Linding lab members to the Natural History Museum. As a result, the Museum withdrew their offer to the Linding lab, citing insufficient funding based on budget information provided by BRIC.

Consequently, four lab members filed a civil suit against KU on October 30, 2017. Additionally, these researchers, through their legal representatives, lodged a police report on November 20, 2017, alleging embezzlement (concerning material redistribution) and vandalism (related to supercomputer damage and loss of MorphoMap data).

Engaging the Funding Agency

Both Dr. Longden and Minister Søren Pind informed Innovation Fund Denmark of the potential misuse of funds in the fall of 2017. The agency conducted an investigation extending through March 2018, reviewing financial reports approved by Dr. Linding (the grant holder) for 2014 and 2015, along with project plans submitted in late 2016 and early 2017, which demonstrated the project's feasibility. The ruling in May 2018 declared the budgets for 2014 and 2015 undisputed.

However, Dr. Longden partially received vindication from the funding agency. In a ruling issued by Peter Aadal Nielsen (Scientific Officer of the Innovation Fund), it was determined that BRIC could not justify using grant funds for unrelated projects based on claims of poor project management or communication. Consequently, the 2016 and 2017 budgets were deemed partially misallocated by BRIC administrators. Innovation Fund Denmark also concluded that Dr. Linding, as the grant holder, bore final budgetary responsibility, not the university’s administrative unit, BRIC.

By July 2018, BRIC provided revised financial statements for 2016 and 2017 to Innovation Fund, acknowledging the agency's ruling and restoring some funds to the MorphoMap grant. Dr. Linding continued to demand further investigation and contested specific findings of the ruling. Following this outcome, Dr. Longden wrote again to the Minister of Higher Education and Science (Tommy Ahlers).

Innovation Fund later engaged an independent auditor, Deloitte, to assess disputed financial reports and address specific concerns raised by Dr. Linding. The independent audit of the 2016 and 2017 budgets was completed in February 2019, resulting in a final ruling from Innovation Fund on May 3, 2019. Deloitte identified funds that had not been properly restored to the grant based on the initial ruling and additional expenditures that lacked adequate documentation linking them to the MorphoMap project (and for which the Linding lab had not authorized).

Innovation Fund, Dr. Linding, and BRIC were given an opportunity to respond to the audit report. Based on this audit, the Innovation Fund determined that two out of the four disputed expenses were incorrectly charged to the MorphoMap grant. Dr. Linding and his colleagues contended that some findings were based on false information from BRIC. Nonetheless, Dr. Longden expressed satisfaction with his decision to report financial misconduct at BRIC.

Unfortunate Consequences

While lab members may feel a sense of vindication, the outcome remains tragic. KU has already obliterated the research output from this grant and several others. The loss of research materials from the cell freezer included:

• Over 500 cell lines engineered to express specific protein kinases or kinase fusion proteins (part of a European Research Council grant awarded to Dr. Linding)
• A panel of 30 breast cancer cell lines designed for live-cell imaging of nuclear and cytoplasmic compartments (part of the MorphoMap project)
• Another set of breast cancer cells engineered with point mutations to test new cancer therapeutics (part of the MorphoMap project).

These cell lines are irreplaceable through simple ordering; they must be recreated by researchers. The lab also lost genomic and proteomic samples from cell lines and human tissues (both normal and cancerous), which are equally non-replaceable. Repeating experiments and obtaining these samples again is necessary. Fourteen years of research and over 200 terabytes of data were lost due to the destruction of archives and damage to the supercomputer. This data is irretrievable.

Some of the destroyed data and cell lines supported four published studies, while other data remained unanalyzed, and the newly developed cell lines had not yet been employed to validate or follow up on findings that would have stemmed from the analysis of the lost data.

The education of two PhD students was interrupted, and two post-doctoral researchers departed the lab without any publications.

The criminal case based on police reports filed by Linding lab members was forwarded to the Danish Public Prosecutor on October 18, 2018.

At this moment, Innovation Fund has ruled that 95% of the funds spent by the Erler lab in 2016 and 2017 must be reimbursed to the MorphoMap grant, and that BRIC misallocated roughly 400,000 DKK in funds that had been marked as "approved" by the Linding lab, even though no one in the lab had authorized these expenditures. The civil and criminal cases remain open.

KU has reorganized BRIC, and Mette Bjørnlund no longer appears to be with the institution. Although her name still shows up in search results, all links to her yield "page not found" errors. Dr. Brunak has moved from DTU to the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at KU. Dr. Helin continues to be affiliated with KU and BRIC; however, in September 2018, he accepted a position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

According to LinkedIn, Dr. Linding is now a "Lead Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin," yet his lab website still bears a BRIC copyright.

Dr. Longden currently does not have an updated affiliation and is listed solely on the Linding Lab web pages. He continues to work with locally stored data that was not lost, resulting in one publication (Engel et al., Bowhead: Bayesian modelling of cell velocity during concerted cell migration. PLOS Comp. Biol. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005900). Publishing additional findings remains challenging, as addressing reviewer concerns is difficult or impossible without the lost data.

Looking Forward

Rather than decimating research output exceeding 54 million DKK (8.3 million USD) in funding, KU should have fostered a supportive environment, collaborated with Dr. Linding to enhance project management, and exercised appropriate oversight of its administrators. The institution has failed to uphold its mission of "providing a framework for critical thinking, insights, and a quest for truth for the benefit of society," which is "based on independent research and research-based education at the highest level." Some might argue this reflects KU's adherence to the Law of Jante:

> "A code of conduct common in Nordic countries, which portrays doing things out of the ordinary, being overtly personally ambitious, or not conforming as unworthy and inappropriate."

From my viewpoint, envisioning a favorable resolution is difficult. A series of events that might allow the research to recover partially and benefit the public from the progress made on the MorphoMap project would involve reinstating Dr. Linding at KU, allowing him to join the Centre for GeoGenetics, and providing lab space at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, along with the transfer of any remaining materials, funds, the supercomputer, and any undestroyed data. Such a scenario seems improbable. The issues surrounding Dr. Linding, Dr. Longden, and the other individuals involved in the lawsuit will hinder any success for these researchers at KU. A reputation for being "difficult" will precede them and taint future interactions with administration and colleagues.

I believe all faculty with budget responsibilities should receive training on grant management, understanding budgets (both simple and detailed), and using the accounting system. Each institute should mandate training for faculty applying for grants or with authority to approve expenses. This training should occur at least once or twice a year. Such education would not only equip scientists with essential information but also facilitate opportunities for researchers to meet and build rapport with finance and accounting administrators—those responsible for budget reports and crucial points of contact for resolving issues.

Administrators must also appreciate the potential repercussions of budgetary decisions. They should recognize which payments can be delayed or denied without consequence and which could lead to the irreversible loss of vital samples. For instance, payments for freezers and liquid nitrogen should be prioritized, as their failure could result in the destruction of irreplaceable research materials. Fostering a collegial rather than an adversarial relationship would benefit both parties.

Disclosure: Dr. Linding served on the Editorial Board while I was Editor of Science Signaling.