Poisonous science: the dark side of the lab

This is a sad story. But there are lots of truth.

Irresponsible mentoring, scapegoating junior students and the pressure to publish are the root of all evil in academia. I am now hesitant to report a flawed publication because the first author was a graduate student who was pressured by her irresponsible mentors to publish a poor study in a journal whose editor was one of her mentor's friend. Yes, how do we approach flawed publications when we know that those who will suffer the most are previous unfortunate students who were supervised by irresponsible incompetent mentors?

I'm very glad you wrote this article and I sympathize with your loss. The subject of academic misconduct is rarely discussed and you have raised some important points regarding the sources of misconduct. It is true that academic science is cut-throat. This will not likely change because scientists are naturally unemotional. They can be cold. You have got to have guts of steel to work there or a good strategy. Personally, I have spent some free time studying criminal psychology to give myself the skills to identify and avoid threats and maneuver this environment. During my doctoral degree the students of one lab in the vicinity of my own freely admitted they never replicated anything. They published their work and all journals require replication so, surely, some misrepresentations were made. This and other forms of misconduct are probably very common. My super pet peeve is gift authorship. I worked very hard for all of my publications but some people are just given this recognition as a friendly pat on the back. This is fraud and it is so common it has lead me to believe that unless you participate in this fraud, you will never have the publication power to work in science.

"a vicious culture of competition, back-stabbing and more sabotage" There well may be such dysfunctional labs out there, but these are clearly very exceptional. I did a postdoc in a high-powered lab at UC Berkeley and have very fond memories from that time.

What a sad story... How injured, harmed and damaged this scientist must have been because of the effects of the warped academic ecology he had surrendered himself to at the moment of his wrongful decision... The words science and scientific are not to be misused. Nevertheless it happens, in circumstances as described in your story or by people with an academic degree who pontificate that, for example, it cannot be true that there are bacteria living in the gastric juice. Warren and Marshall, later Nobel Prize winners, who nevertheless proved that heliobacter pylori can live in the gastric juice and also are the very cause of stomach ulcers. Bullying and threatening has no place in science. Scientists misbehave when they pontificate that for example health treatments that have not been scientifically proven cannot possibly work and are to be forbidden, and when they personally attack, threaten and and besmurch people, who give these treatments, on the internet, in the parliament , and so forth (as happend to me) . Journalists and reporters misbehave when they put pressure on well known people with an academic title such as to publicly downcry the names of people who have, in their innovative researches and the applications of their outcome, dared to successfully help people to be healed of their addictive habits or diseases (this also happened to me). I considered committing suicide because of vicious ad hominem attacks, not substantiated by arguments, received from people with an academic degree. I will not give up my research, my skills and my life because of their misbehaviour but I want their misbehaviour to be removed from the world. Yes , there is a big chance that one will suffer as a whistleblower but what about the honour to fight for science to be free from polluting restrictions....... Barry Wentzel MA in Dutch Linguistics and Litterature , The Netherlands ; Addiction therapist and researcher

Patrick`s boss was a sociopath with references. Whistleblowers are very welcome in the scientific area.

This is an excellent article; I am from India and I can not undo what the author (and her husband) have gone through. But, I want to tell the author that this story in different forms can be found all across the globe. Closer home, in the city of Kolkata in India, one Dr Subhash Mukhopadhyay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Mukhopadhyay_(physician) was so mercilessly hounded by the Government, that he had to commit suicide in 1981; had he not been persecuted and forced to die, probably he would have been the creator of the world's first test tube baby (he is officially acknowledged to be the creator of the second).

Could it be https://ori.hhs.gov/content/case-summary-cullinane-andrew-r

The race to publishing is a race pushed by publishers themselves and groups like Scopus, Web of Sciences...etc., because they can then sell their services at a higher price to academic institutions, and as those publishing groups decide for a lot the university ranking, it is a vicious circle out of which academics, researchers and down the line students are the losers. There are too many Patricks and too many on the verge of becoming Patrick unfortunately.

My niece, Anna Owensby's story. All too sad. What disturbs me to the core is complete lack of accountability on the part of these universities /labs. https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i32/Grappling-graduate-student-mental-health.html