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Comment by viburnum | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine was doing a chemistry phd when he discovered his supervisor was falsifying data. If he had blown the whistle it would have ended his career, but if he had played along his dissertation would have been based on false data. Both options were bad so he just quit.

https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/25/postdocs-grad-students-f...

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I was doing a robotics engineering PhD at a highly ranked university a few years ago. I contacted the dean of engineering and the office of legal affairs and informed them that my advisor had submitted falsified data to journals, falsified financial statements to his sponsors and the university, performed experiments risking serious bodily harm on human test subjects without IRB approval, committed wage theft against multiple students, and slandered several of his research assistants to keep them from getting funding and work outside of his control. They swept it under the rug and gave him tenure. This was one of the universities that was in the news for faculty members and administrators accepting bribes from celebrities a year or two ago. They added another billion to their endowment and I left with my MS.

That's some guts to do the right thing. Respect.

I was not faced with such a shitty situation, and I probably would have done the same as well, but the right thing would have been to report it.

If you report it then the grant money is gone and everybody in the lab loses their job and all the PhD students are derailed.

That’s the fault of the person falsifying data, not the person reporting the fraud.

Yeah but it still happens, and to people you care about who didn't deserve it.

That's true. Several people will probably lose their jobs.

But that is the kind of thinking that condemns whistleblowing for the wrong reasons. To put it differently, people rather prefer to keep on pretending if that keeps their jobs than to do the right thing. And that makes everyone a fraudster.

In most fields this is unimportant. Bad research can have significant public policy impact.

Sure, it sucks for the students, but you have to introduce accountability in academia for it to stop being worthless.

Ideally, yes! That would be the best outcome.

I don't know why people always see dens of corruption and think that they ought to be protected, because of the jobs of the folks doing the corrupt work. Jobs are not the point of life, and we should accept that some jobs are bad jobs which should be eliminated.

Huh? But he didn't ... he just fled.

When I started my PhD I became tangled in a similar situation. I denounced it and it got me kicked out of that program. I had to start over, but I would do it again if the situation called for it. No amount of money or "awards" compensate for having a dishonorable life.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

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