I’ve never seen a desktop like the one David Vaux deals with every day. Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets and file types I can’t even recognise fill practically every inch of his laptop’s screen. As I sit next to him in the red-brick University House at the University of Melbourne, his cursor searches for a file among the clutter. He tells me, half-jokingly, to forget what I’m seeing – almost all of the material concerns investigations into research misconduct in Australian universities. Some are ongoing. Some are confidential.

The one I’m interested in is not a secret. It’s a case Vaux, one of Australia’s most respected scientific integrity advocates, has been following for more than a decade. In fact, he’s one of the case’s major protagonists – Captain Ahab in search of his White Whale. It’s a case centred around Levon Michael Khachigian, a highly regarded vascular biologist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). In the past two decades, Professor Khachigian has published more than 250 research articles and brought in more than $30 million of funding to the university in a quest to understand blood vessels and the pathology of cancer.

Vaux double-clicks a document on the desktop. An 80-page timeline expands across the screen. The first date, at the top of the page, is June 1995. It references a seminal paper by American scientists regarding a new type of therapeutic drug, known as DNAzymes. But for Vaux, this story starts 14 years later: August 25, 2009. It remains unfinished.

On that day, after spotting a duplicated image – a potential sign of data manipulation or fabrication – in a scientific paper authored by Khachigian and some of his students, Vaux sent an email to alert the vascular biologist to the issue. Most researchers would be immediately concerned by this kind of correspondence and eager to correct the scientific record. Khachigian’s response, Vaux says, was blasé.