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Bhrigu's actions are surprising, but probably not unique. There are few firm numbers showing the prevalence of research sabotage, but conversations with graduate students, postdocs and research-misconduct experts suggest that such misdeeds occur elsewhere, and that most go unreported or unpoliced. In this case, the episode set back research, wasted potentially tens of thousands of dollars and terrorized a young student. More broadly, acts such as Bhrigu's — along with more subtle actions to hold back or derail colleagues' work — have a toxic effect on science and scientists. They are an affront to the implicit trust between scientists that is necessary for research endeavours to exist and thrive.

Despite all this, there is little to prevent perpetrators re-entering science.

federal bodies that provide research funding have limited ability and inclination to take action in sabotage cases because they aren't interpreted as fitting the federal definition of research misconduct, which is limited to plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of research data.

In Bhrigu's case, administrators at the University of Michigan worked with police to investigate, thanks in part to the persistence of Ames and her supervisor, Theo Ross. "The question is, how many universities have such procedures in place that scientists can go and get that kind of support?" says Christine Boesz, former inspector-general for the US National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, and now a consultant on scientific accountability. "Most universities I was familiar with would not necessarily be so responsive."

Some labs are known to be hyper-competitive, with principal investigators pitting postdocs against each other. But Ross's lab is a small, collegial place. At the time that Ames was noticing problems, it housed just one other graduate student, a few undergraduates doing projects, and the lab manager, Katherine Oravecz-Wilson, a nine-year veteran of the lab whom Ross calls her "eyes and ears". And then there was Bhrigu, an amiable postdoc who had joined the lab in April 2009.

Some people whom Ross consulted with tried to convince her that Ames was hitting a rough patch in her work and looking for someone else to blame. But Ames was persistent, so Ross took the matter to the university's office of regulatory affairs, which advises on a wide variety of rules and regulations pertaining to research and clinical care. Ray Hutchinson, associate dean of the office, and Patricia Ward, its director, had never dealt with anything like it before. After several meetings and two more instances of alcohol in the media, Ward contacted the department of public safety — the university's police force — on 9 March. They immediately launched an investigation — into Ames herself. She endured two interrogations and a lie-detector test before investigators decided to look elsewhere.

At 4:00 a.m. on Sunday 18 April, officers installed two cameras in the lab: one in the cold room where Ames's blots had been contaminated, and one above the refrigerator where she stored her media. Ames came in that day and worked until 5:00 p.m. On Monday morning at around 10:15, she found that her medium had been spiked again. When Ross reviewed the tapes of the intervening hours with Richard Zavala, the officer assigned to the case, she says that her heart sank. Bhrigu entered the lab at 9:00 a.m. on Monday and pulled out the culture media that he would use for the day. He then returned to the fridge with a spray bottle of ethanol, usually used to sterilize lab benches. With his back to the camera, he rummaged through the fridge for 46 seconds. Ross couldn't be sure what he was doing, but it didn't look good. Zavala escorted Bhrigu to the campus police department for questioning. When he told Bhrigu about the cameras in the lab, the postdoc asked for a drink of water and then confessed. He said that he had been sabotaging Ames's work since February. (He denies involvement in the December and January incidents.)

Some say that the structure of the scientific enterprise is to blame. The big rewards — tenured positions, grants, papers in stellar journals — are won through competition. To get ahead, researchers need only be better than those they are competing with. That ethos, says Brian Martinson, a sociologist at HealthPartners Research Foundation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, can lead to sabotage. He and others have suggested that universities and funders need to acknowledge the pressures in the research system and try to ease them by means of education and rehabilitation, rather than simply punishing perpetrators after the fact.

Bhrigu says that he felt pressure in moving from the small college at Toledo to the much bigger one in Michigan. He says that some criticisms he received from Ross about his incomplete training and his work habits frustrated him, but he doesn't blame his actions on that. "In any kind of workplace there is bound to be some pressure," he says. "I just got jealous of others moving ahead and I wanted to slow them down."

At Washtenaw County Courthouse in July, having reviewed the case files, Pollard Hines delivered Bhrigu's sentence. She ordered him to pay around US$8,800 for reagents and experimental materials, plus $600 in court fees and fines — and to serve six months' probation, perform 40 hours of community service and undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

But the threat of a worse sentence hung over Bhrigu's head. At the request of the prosecutor, Ross had prepared a more detailed list of damages, including Bhrigu's entire salary, half of Ames's, six months' salary for a technician to help Ames get back up to speed, and a quarter of the lab's reagents. The court arrived at a possible figure of $72,000, with the final amount to be decided upon at a restitution hearing in September.

Ross, though, is happy that the ordeal is largely over. For the month-and-a-half of the investigation, she became reluctant to take on new students or to hire personnel. She says she considered packing up her research programme. She even questioned her own sanity, worrying that she was the one sabotaging Ames's work via "an alternate personality". Ross now wonders if she was too trusting, and urges other lab heads to "realize that the whole spectrum of humanity is in your lab. So, when someone complains to you, take it seriously."

She also urges others to speak up when wrongdoing is discovered. After Bhrigu pleaded guilty in June, Ross called Trempe at the University of Toledo. He was shocked, of course, and for more than one reason. His department at Toledo had actually re-hired Bhrigu. Bhrigu says that he lied about the reason he left Michigan, blaming it on disagreements with Ross. Toledo let Bhrigu go in July, not long after Ross's call.

Now that Bhrigu is in India, there is little to prevent him from getting back into science. And even if he were in the United States, there wouldn't be much to stop him. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, through its Office of Research Integrity, will sometimes bar an individual from receiving federal research funds for a time if they are found guilty of misconduct. But Bhigru probably won't face that prospect because his actions don't fit the federal definition of misconduct, a situation Ross finds strange. "All scientists will tell you that it's scientific misconduct because it's tampering with data," she says.

Ames says that the experience shook her trust in her chosen profession. "I did have doubts about continuing with science. It hurt my idea of science as a community that works together, builds upon each other's work and collaborates."

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

Complicating matters further is the fact that these reporting patterns vary over time and are reflected in observed trends.   So, when a change in the police reported crime rate is observed from year to year or across a span of time we may be observing a “real” change, we may be observing a change in how these crimes come to the attention of police, or we may be seeing a mixture of both.

Generally, the most reliable criminal statistic is the homicide rate – it’s very difficult, though not impossible, to miss a dead body. In fact, homicides in Canada are counted in the year that they become known to police and not in the year that they occurred.  Our most reliable number is very, very close, but not infallible.

Crimes known to the police nearly always under measure the true incidence of crime, so other measures are needed to better complete our understanding. The reported crimes measure is reported every year to Statistics Canada from data that makes up the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey. This is a very rich data set that measures police data very accurately but tells us nothing about unreported crime.

We do have some data on unreported crime available. Victims are interviewed (after self-identifying) via the General Social Survey. The survey is conducted every five years

This measure captures information in eight crime categories both reported, and not reported to police. It has its own set of interpretation problems and pathways to misuse. The survey relies on self-reporting, so the accuracy of the information will be open to errors due to faulty memories, willingness to report, recording errors etc.

From the last data set available, self-identified victims did not report 69% of violent victimizations (sexual assault, robbery and physical assault), 62% of household victimizations (break and enter, motor vehicle/parts theft, household property theft and vandalism), and 71% of personal property theft victimizations.

while people generally understand that crimes go unreported and unknown to police, they tend to be surprised and perhaps even shocked at the actual amounts that get unreported. These numbers sound scary. However, the most common reasons reported by victims of violent and household crime for not reporting were: believing the incident was not important enough (68%) believing the police couldn’t do anything about the incident (59%), and stating that the incident was dealt with in another way (42%).

Also, note that the survey indicated that 82% of violent incidents did not result in injuries to the victims. Do claims that we should do something about all this hidden crime make sense in light of what this crime looks like in the limited way we can understand it? How could you be reasonably certain that whatever intervention proposed would in fact reduce the actual amount of crime and not just reduce the amount that goes unreported?

Data is collected at all levels of the crime continuum with differing levels of accuracy and applicability. This is nicely reflected in the concept of “the crime funnel”. All criminal incidents that are ever committed are at the opening of the funnel. There is “loss” all along the way to the bottom where only a small sample of incidences become known with charges laid, prosecuted successfully and responded to by the justice system.  What goes into the top levels of the funnel affects what we can know at any other point later.