yet another reason not to go into academia...
(maybe dave will find this slightly more interesting...)
well, it's not like i really needed any more reasons, but this story is so awful it really seals the deal.
(edit: since this is extremely current news, and could potentially be catastrophic, i've blotted out the relevant names below.)
after yoga on saturday, krister, *****, and i went to a nearby coffee shop for tea and croissants. while there, ***** told us about what had been going on in her lab last week. she's been a post-doc in the plant biology lab at unil for a year or so now, and she was told beforehand that her project was going to be to continue some of the work which had been done by one of the finishing phd students. now, what actually happened is that said finishing phd student was a parisienne bitch of epic proportions who refused to turn over any part of the project except under extreme duress, ended up staying for another eight months, and took the first author slot on the paper they recently published in nature, which was basically a summary of the work my friend was told she was going to be responsible for. but she was still second author, and even second author on a paper in nature is nothing to scoff at... until last week, when she tried to reproduce some of the results... now, the bitch is finally gone (got a very cushy post-doc position in ****, england), and suddenly they can't find any of the data/materials that correspond to what was published. and at the moment it's looking like they can't reproduce them either. all indications point to the whore from paris having faked it all and covered it up, which somehow went unnoticed because she was the professor's golden child that could do no wrong (of course, at this point, my first thought was to ask if the professor had been "involved" with her, but my friend thinks this is unlikely).
this is unbelievably shitty, and stands a decent chance of ruining not only my friend's entire career, but effectively shutting down her professor's whole lab. on friday, when my friend was talking with the professor, he apparently started making jokes about wanting her to be the one to write the press release if he was found dead on the couch this week.
wow. i thought the tension was a little thick between alcherio and some of his "competitors," but this is beyond anything i would have ever imagined. well, please keep your fingers crossed, and hopefully it will all turn out okay for my friend, and hopefully the other bimbo will get what's coming to her...
3 Comments:
Wow, that's pretty intense. At least they seem to have caught her.
Funny you should post that now, becuase I was just going to e-mail you asking about grad school.
I suppose this ammounts to an e-mail anyways. Do you know what the deal with the GREs and sending your scores is? Do you have to specify where to send them when you register, at the test, or can you do it afterwards?
Also, how did you decide which schools to apply to, and how many? What's the story with European schools? I might be interested in going to one (even after hearing all your stories!).
Finally, you're pretty close to being done if I'm not mistaken? What are you going to do after you finish?
regarding the GRE: i'm pretty sure that it works similarly to the SAT/ACT; you can (but probably don't want to) specify schools to send the results to before taking it, with the registration---OR, you take it first, and then if you like your score, you request scoresheets to be sent wherever you want, probably at some extra cost.
as for choosing a grad school, well, i feel a long commentary coming on, so i'll probably make a full entry on this in the next day or so. in which i'll also undoubtedly bitch (again, and at great length) about my own doctorate, which, as you mention, should probably be a lot closer to getting finished than it actually is.
aahhhh, I read this post after the more recent one, so it all makes sense now as to why the other was directed at doug, even though we're both in the vague planning-for-grad-school stage.
as for content of the post, that's really pretty messed up. I don't honestly understand the desire to fake results like that - for people that are intelligent enough to work in science, you would think they would also be smart enough to realize that a community which is solely directed at discovering truths would eventually find that sort of thing out.
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