Pulp fiction, in Nature

Peter Starokadomsky, "Biomolecule"“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself —

and you are the easiest person to fool...
After you’ve not fooled yourself,
it’s easy not to fool other scientists.
You just have to be honest
in a conventional way
after that.”
Richard P. Feynman(translation at the end of the text)

In September, the world leader of scientific periodicals, the journal Nature, published an article about the identification of the fact of deliberate sabotage in a small American scientific laboratory. The fact that everything is going wrong in America – and schoolchildren are shooting, and cars are being stolen, and medical insurance is getting more expensive – everyone already knows that. And here in another laboratory, a post-doc is caught deliberately spoiling the results of a graduate student. The question arises – why write about such a banal incident in a respected scientific journal? And the fact is that the problem of honesty in science is now particularly acute, and they are going to fight it in the most serious ways, including, it seems, the police.

Whether such scandals have become more frequent lately, or they have simply become publicized with special gusto, however, great scientists, including Nobel laureates, are increasingly withdrawing their articles due to fraud on the part of their own employees (see, for example, "The Designer missed!" and other examples). The last story took place in a rather modest laboratory at the University of Michigan (Theodora Ross Laboratory). This is not the first and not the last case when one had a complete stagnation in business, and he began to harm the other – these are the stories of Mozart and Salieri, Lenin and Trotsky.

However, it was this incident that gained considerable popularity, apparently because the events developed according to the canons of the ideal tabloid detective. An Indian post-doc (a villain and a psychopath) and an innocent graduate student, a wise professor and smart policemen are a real movie in reality. The September issue of Nature magazine devoted three whole pages to analyzing the circumstances of this "tabloid" story – which is not only very wasteful, but also allows you to suspect the issuing editor of previous cooperation with the yellow press.

The publication transparently hints that the "unscientific" behavior of researchers that has recently become more frequent poses a serious danger to the entire institute of scientific research. Scandals are surfacing more and more often, which in principle can be given a reasonable explanation. The fact is that in the modern world, state borders have largely erased, and people from different countries (and therefore with different ethical and moral attitudes) begin to work together. And the fact that for one it is a lie or a "pull–up" of results, for another it may turn out to be the absolute norm. (The author himself encountered a similar bitter misunderstanding when working on the same topic with a Lebanese.) As a result, the conflict is growing like a snowball, especially in multinational teams that dominate laboratories around the world today.

Cast (in order of appearance on the screen):
The villain – post-doc Vipul Bhrigu (Vipul Bhrigu);
The judge is the head, Theodora Ross (Theodora Ross);
The victim is a graduate student Heather Ames.

This time we tried to make an instructive story from history on the topic "what is good and what is bad". However, an echo of the question immediately arises: is it worth bringing the "home" secrets of the laboratory to a wide discussion? It is difficult to imagine that scientists used to be clean on hand – they didn't steal anything, they didn't harm anyone – especially at the forefront of science, where the interests of ambitious and, alas, not always sufficiently principled people collide. Here is a summary of the article under discussion about laboratory hardcore:

Sabotage in the laboratory...

Heather Ames, a graduate student, Vipul Bhrigu, an Indian post-doc, and a couple of other people worked in one small laboratory – no one was grabbing stars from the sky, but they didn't pass the back ones either: a typical average laboratory. And then Ames began to have strange problems – at least run to a psychic or a psychotherapist. Then some proteins will appear on Western blots, and then some proteins will disappear, then the cups with cells will be completely confused, then the cells themselves will simply die - and such bedlam lasts for almost six months. The poor girl ran to do electrophoresis to her husband in a nearby laboratory, but as soon as she returned to her room, everything started all over again. The last straw was that Ames found alcohol in the DMEM nutrient medium, which was carefully deposited by her in the far corner of the refrigerator, which naturally caused the cells to die again. After long days of confusion and anxiety, our Ames went to the psychic boss, and she, not trusting the girl's impressionability, told her to read the Virgin three times to double-check everything. When that didn't help either, they went to the police station together, and there they tortured Ames with a lie detector.

As a result of the check, it became clear that it was not Ames herself who poured alcohol into the nutrient medium, and the policeman (after reviewing the "X-files") decided to sneak into the laboratory and install two hidden video cameras there. And then it was revealed that exactly at midnight on the weekend, the Indian post-doc Bhrigu took a bottle of alcohol and generously splashed it into a new sterile nutrient medium, which poor Ames brewed herself in a new way. And Vipul was seized, and he was expelled from the country in twenty-four hours as the writer Solzhenitsyn, and they forced him to pay more money. And he was upset and said he was sorry, but he had been hurting colleagues for six months not for self-interest, but because of stress and depression, and even the results were not coming – so he did not want to be a black sheep.

Everything ended well – the Hindu was kicked out, the girl was given extra time to finish her work, and a moralistic story was written about the laboratory with an instructive ending. In Kind... (Research integrity: Sabotage!, Nature 467, 516-518).

It is likely that the main culprit really has big mental problems, and it would be worth isolating him – we don't even dispute that. However, how did he come to such a life? And why did the usual, in fact, story – the conflict of colleagues – get such publicity?

Photo of a spoiled Western blot.
To be honest, we do not undertake to judge,
what is spoiled here on purpose, and what is not.

Conscious managers prefer not to advertise such internal problems – so as not to take the trash out of the hut. Here, on the contrary, everything is described with juicy details. Perhaps the fact is that Theodora Ross, the head of the laboratory, is still far from an old person and was tempted by a loud effect, sacrificing a balanced solution to the conflict. By the way, the level of research in her laboratory seems to be quite high - otherwise you will not be published in journals like Cancer Cell (impact factor ≈17). And yet – a strange craving for "yellow" fame casts a shadow on the team of Dr. Ross. For example, why was the apparent inadequacy of the Indian post-doc not noticed earlier? After all, only violent madness can "justify" self–sabotage - and the article explicitly states that Heather and Bhrigu worked on the same project: they studied the role of mutant forms of the HIP1 protein (Huntingtin Interacting Protein 1) in the development of cancer. In this scenario, it becomes unclear whether the post-doc is really "that", and it should be tied to the bed, or something is seriously being left out in this story.

The moral of this fable is not new. But, unfortunately, the call of scientists "There are no lies in science" as if inadvertently transformed into "Everyone lies". In this regard, I recall a note published by Thomas Hettinger in the same Nature a month earlier: "Forgery, or don't expect science to fix everything by itself" ("Misconstruct: don't assume science is self-correcting"). Expressing his main idea in his own words – scientific research is so complex that sometimes minor mistakes are not worth correcting, and it is easier to slightly falsify the results in order to achieve the stated goal... That's just on a global scale, such a practice will destroy science, since no one will double-check hundreds of other people's experiments before putting their one hundred and first.

In the same spirit, the Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman once expressed himself (the original is rendered in an epigraph): "The first principle is not to fool yourself, because there is no person who could be fooled as easily... When you become honest with yourself, you will be honest with others. As a result, you simply cannot be dishonest in your aspirations."

Do not make public the internal showdowns in science – the media will not appreciate the complexity of the problems, they will rewrite everything in their own way and turn the deep problem of honesty in science into a cheap tabloid detective, in kind.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
21.10.2010