Sabotage: postdoc fiddles with graduate student's cells | Hacker News Reader

Sabotage: postdoc fiddles with graduate student's cells

arstechnica.com

44 pointsdeutronium17 comments

My other half experienced something similar, though, not completely sure it was malice. Her experimental results she had gathered for 6 months were kept on ice while she performed the necessary steps for the next stage. Another grad student "cleaned" the freezer locker and left only her experiments out. She lost 6 months of work. That grad student denied all involvement even though that grad student had been seen pulling everything out.

It happens all the time, too.

Hi, I'm writing an article on problems PhD students encounter for New Scientist -- if your other half is willing, I;d really like to talk to her. Thanks, Shanta

P.S. My email address is shanta.barley@googlemail.com

An observation: it's often best to keep the police out of your life, even when you think you've been wronged, unless you're confident you can prove your innocence.

The funny thing is that I can tell more stories about shady postdocs and mediocre post-docs than I can about fantastic postdocs. Of all the journal articles with results that are mysteriously difficult to reproduce, most of them that I've come across have been from shady postdocs.

One of the reasons I shied away from academia is the nature of the workforce, and how you have to treat them to get tenure.

Yet postdocs are in a unique position and do important work, no matter if they continue in Academia or not (Discmaimer: I was a postdoc up to some years ago). They usually have little teaching or service duties and can devote all of their time to research. It's the ideal position after a PhD, when you can focus on research (past and new) before you are hired as an assistant professor and get really busy with teaching, committees, etc.

The fact that you can tell more stories about shady/mediocre postdocs vs. good ones is subjective. Many of today's professors preferred postponing their job to be postdocs somewhere else for a year or two.

I, too, was once a postdoc. The real problem with being put in a unique position to do important work is that you're under the gun to do important work. That situation leads to lots of negative consequences. Especially when you notice that the number of people employed as postdocs at any given time is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of assistant professors being hired that year.

I certainly think that being a postdoc can have great value (it did for me, and it did for everyone I know who eventually became a professor), but in practice it's a mixed bag and the structure of the situation produces mixed results.

The real problem with being put in a unique position to do important work is that you're under the gun to do important work.

But so are you as a professor, at least up to tenure. I agree it is a double edged sword. It is intuitive that a research community prefers to evaluate someone before offering him a tenure-track job.

PS The ratio postdocs/asst.prof can vary a lot. For example it was much lower than 10 in all of the departments I worked at, though not far from it in Europe.

I've seen similar mentions about problems elsewhere. I think it is mostly the availability heuristic at work - assholes and incompetents are simply more memorable than people who quietly go about their work without making waves or screwing things up.

This reminds me of a recent post on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731459

The postdoc thought it was subtle enough to kill those cultures with ethanol, and thought everybody else wouldn't be clever enough to catch him. But the grad student was probably clever enough.

This wasn't nearly as interesting as the title led me to believe: I thought it was going to be a Marvel Comics origin story.

I'd venture the offender is not really in his line of work for the right reasons if he does that. Just shows what's happened to science since it's founders' times.

What would be a wrong reason to study science?

Greed for fame, money, power etc.

Why is it wrong to study science because you want to make money at it?

I don't believe wanting to make money at something equates to greed for money, necessarily. You can pursue science for monetary gain, and no (reasonable) person will hold that against you. Scientists have to eat too, y'know?

That said, there is such a thing as going too far, and to sabotage the work of others, literally tamper with, damage, and/or destroy it, definitely crosses that line.

Well, not morally wrong or anything. But you can earn a lot more with the same effort elsewhere. For good science to result, you will usually have to be driven primarily by your passion for the research itself. ymmv

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