{"id":216553,"date":"2024-10-04T00:00:09","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T04:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/?p=216553"},"modified":"2024-10-08T16:33:10","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T20:33:10","slug":"a-scientific-fraud-an-investigation-a-lab-in-recovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/science-and-society\/a-scientific-fraud-an-investigation-a-lab-in-recovery\/","title":{"rendered":"A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery."},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science is built on trust. What happens when someone destroys it? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":218379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":""},"categories":[153],"tags":[141,27,38,66,15,16,207],"acf":{"primary_tag":207,"doi_url":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.53053\/USNX9479","custom_js_library":"","hero_type":"feat_image","hero_alt_image":null,"hero_youtube":"","hero_video":null,"hero_layout":"full","hero_caption":"Fallout zone:<\/strong> After misconduct occurs in a lab, the bystanders are left to grapple with the scientific and personal consequences.","hero_by":"Illustrations by","hero_credit":218382,"hero_bg_color":"none","authors":[107167],"other_authors":"","related_title":"Explore more from The Transmitter<\/em>","related_hide":false,"related_filter":"latest","related_tag":null,"related_category":null,"related_custom":{"articles":null},"recommended_title":"Recommended reading","recommended_hide":false,"recommended_filter":"latest","recommended_tag":null,"recommended_category":null,"recommended_custom":{"articles":null},"comps":[{"acf_fc_layout":"audio_comp","audio_title":"Listen to this story:","audio":218828,"apple_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/a-scientific-fraud-an-investigation-a-lab-in-recovery\/id1420631463?i=1000672262646","spotify_link":"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/7eXkIn5OKYehYBX3ujaZWt?si=ApYkr34PRzamr5q5jyjOjg","google_link":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GsVuPageTeU&list=PL4o3hdmvshNYSgnJhumnNCWsIFJCl6vIg&index=1"},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"Daniel Heinz clicked through each folder in the file drive, searching for the answers that had evaded him and his lab mates for years.\r\n\r\nHeinz, a graduate student in Brenda Bloodgood\u2019s lab<\/a> at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), was working on a Ph.D. project, part of which built on the work of a postdoctoral researcher who had left the lab and started his own a few years prior. The former postdoc studied how various types of electrical activity in the mouse hippocampus induce a gene called NPAS4 in different ways. One of his discoveries was that, in some situations, NPAS4 was induced in the far-reaching dendrites of neurons.\r\n\r\nThe postdoc\u2019s work resulted in a paper in Cell<\/em>, landed him more than $1.4 million in grants and an assistant professor position at the University of Utah, and spawned several follow-up projects in the lab. In other words, it was a slam dunk.\r\n\r\nBut no one else in the lab\u2014including Heinz\u2014could replicate the NPAS4 data. Other lab members always had a technical explanation for why the replication experiments failed, so for years the problem was passed from one trainee to another.\r\n\r\nWhich explains why, on this day in early April 2023, Heinz was poking around the postdoc\u2019s raw data. What he eventually found would lead to a retraction, a resignation and a reckoning, but in the moment, Heinz says, he was not thinking about any of those possibilities. In fact, he had told no one he was doing this. He just wanted to figure out why his experiments weren\u2019t working.\r\n\r\nTo visualize the location of NPAS4, the lab used immunohistochemistry, which tags a gene product with a tailored fluorescent antibody. Any part of the cell that expresses the gene should glow. In his replication attempts, Heinz says he struggled to see any expression, and when he saw indications of it, the signal was faint and noisy. So he wanted to compare his own images to the postdoc\u2019s raw results rather than the processed images included in the 2019 Cell <\/em>paper.\r\n\r\nHe clicked through each file folder until he found a batch of images that looked like they came from the appropriate imaging session, Heinz recalls. Then he sifted through them, trying to find one that resembled the images in the published paper.\r\n\r\nEventually, Heinz says, he recognized a dendrite section that looked like the mirror image of a dendrite from one of the figures. In the paper figure, the image illustrated that NPAS4 appeared only in the dendrites of some neurons. In the raw image, however, it seemed the signal was not restricted to the dendrites but instead filled entire cells.\r\n\r\n[tt_sidebar_quote author='Daniel Heinz']I was just really feeling the horror\u2014the horror of the consequences of what I\u2019d found.[\/tt_sidebar_quote]\r\n\r\nHeinz immediately knew something was wrong, he says. The raw image looked more like a section of tissue from a mouse engineered to express green fluorescent protein (GFP) in a subset of neurons. Immunohistochemistry is much messier. Antibodies are notoriously dirty and bind to more than what they are designed to target. There is often background fluorescence that makes it harder to pull out a signal from the noise. But there was almost no noise in this image.\r\n\r\nHeinz says he suspected that the postdoc had used the GFP fluorescence in the figure but called it the immunohistochemistry data. If his suspicions were correct, it meant the postdoc\u2019s data did not support his story that NPAS4 was induced in the dendrites. It meant the lab had been heading down a dead-end path. It meant the postdoc had faked data.\r\n\r\nIn recent decades, scientific misconduct\u2014formally defined as the falsification, fabrication or plagiarism of data\u2014has lurched into the spotlight. Investigations have uncovered fraudulent data<\/a> at the foundation of a prominent Alzheimer\u2019s disease theory, toppled presidencies<\/a> at elite universities and shuttered entire families of journals<\/a>. Fake studies sully both the scientific record and the public\u2019s opinion of science, and they waste time and tax dollars.\r\n\r\nThe exact prevalence is unknown\u2014it is difficult to conduct a census because cases surface only when the perpetrator is caught, says Lex Bouter<\/a>, professor emeritus of methodology and integrity at Amsterdam University Medical Center and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam\u2014but in surveys, about 4 percent of researchers<\/a> admit to ever having falsified or fabricated data. \u201cUsually, things go right,\u201d Bouter says. It can be hard to fathom when things go wrong.\r\n\r\nThis is in part because trust and science are intimately intertwined, making scientific misconduct \u201cvery much akin to acts of perversion,\u201d argued philosopher of science Michael Ruse in a 2005 essay<\/a>. For most scientists, \u201cto fake your results is just not understandable.\u201d Plus, a romantic mythology often surrounds scientists. They are portrayed as \u201cmore than human, being like gods in their creativity, and also as less than human, being deprived in their work of the passions, attitudes and social ties given to ordinary men,\u201d wrote Robert K. Merton<\/a>, the founder of the sociology of science, in a 1970 essay<\/a>. As a result, he wrote, the public idealizes and idolizes them."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image_comp","aspect_ratio":"inline","title":"","image":218498,"link":"","image_caption":"Dead end:<\/strong> The newly uncovered discrepancies between the postdoctoral researcher\u2019s raw data and paper figures confirmed that the lab had been chasing a false signal for years.","image_byline":{"by":"","credit":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"Framed in this way, it can seem implausible for scientists to ever fake data. But the scientific world is not powered by curiosity alone: It also runs on a credit system, Merton argued. The scientists who create new knowledge are rewarded with recognition. Jobs, funding, and sometimes awards and fame, follow. Under the credit system, misconduct starts to make more sense<\/a>.\r\n\r\nAnd when misconduct does occur, it creates a fallout zone in the lab. Certainly it did for Bloodgood\u2019s group. That\u2019s because misconduct is not just a scientific betrayal; it\u2019s a personal one as well, says C.K. Gunsalus<\/a>, director of the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard for a lab to recover.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis article is about that recovery, and what happens to the people left behind. So we won\u2019t name the person who committed fraud in the Bloodgood Lab, or in any others.\u00a0(The postdoc did not respond to requests to comment for this story.) Fraud happens every year, in labs all over the world. This story could be about anyone.\r\n\r\n[tt_text class='']T[\/tt_text]he postdoc whose work Heinz called into question joined Bloodgood\u2019s lab in January 2015, shortly after finishing his Ph.D. During her own postdoctoral work, Bloodgood<\/a>, associate professor of neurobiology, worked in a lab that was investigating activity-regulated genes, with a focus on immediate early genes, which are induced in cells right after the arrival of an outside signal. And they studied an immediate early gene<\/a> that was specific to neurons: NPAS4. In some experiments, Bloodgood noticed whiffs of NPAS4 in the neuropil of the hippocampus.\r\n\r\nThe postdoc\u2019s first project in Bloodgood\u2019s lab was to explore this phenomenon. He claimed he had found that one kind of electrical stimulation induces NPAS4 in the cell body, another kind induces it in the dendrites, and that the different flavors of NPAS4 interact with DNA in different ways. That is the story he told in the Cell<\/em> paper<\/a>, the product of years of work.\r\n\r\nThese were \u201creally exciting results,\u201d says Pei-Ann Lin Acosta, a graduate student in Bloodgood\u2019s lab at the time, who is now a management consultant. Acosta was working on a similar project, but she used optogenetic stimulation instead of electrophysiology. Yet despite the overlap between her work and the postdoc\u2019s, Acosta says, she never managed to replicate his results.\r\n\r\nThe group investigated several potential causes for the failed replications.\u00a0 First, Bloodgood says she chalked it up to Acosta\u2019s inexperience\u2014she was a new graduate student, after all. Then, the team ran out of the initial supply of antibody they used to tag NPAS4, and they struggled to find an effective replacement. Eventually, Bloodgood suggested the postdoc and Acosta work side by side at the lab bench so they could figure out what was going wrong, Acosta recalls. He was \u201cmarginally helpful,\u201d Acosta says, but they never discovered the source of the problem. She felt so frustrated that sometimes she cried, and eventually she switched to another lab.\r\n\r\nSomething similar happened to Andre DeSouza. He transferred into Bloodgood\u2019s lab in the third year of his Ph.D. His project also built on the postdoc\u2019s work. The postdoc had compared three amounts of electrical stimulation: 0, 0.1 and 100 hertz; DeSouza says he wanted to test smaller increments of stimulation to find the threshold that would trigger NPAS4 expression.\r\n\r\nLike Acosta, his first step was replicating part of the postdoc\u2019s work. And as with Acosta, it never happened, he says. After a few years of failed replications and dead-end troubleshooting, compounded by some personal issues, DeSouza dropped out, leaving the Ph.D. program with just his master\u2019s degree. \u201cIt sucks to feel like, \u2018Oh, I was not a good scientist,\u2019 and then realize, like, \u2018Oh, I was trying to do something that was just never really going to work,\u2019\u201d DeSouza says.\r\n\r\n[tt_text class='']O[\/tt_text]nce Heinz had found the smoking gun in the postdoc\u2019s raw data, it took him a couple of weeks to make \u201cdamn sure that I was right,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\nFirst, he needed to work through the logic of what he saw and what it meant, and \u201cput it outside of my brain.\u201d He started a document and spelled out each issue he found, attached screenshots, recorded file names and walked through what evidence would refute or support his hypothesis.\r\n\r\n\u201cIntuitively, perhaps, I didn\u2019t have any doubt. But that\u2019s not enough,\u201d Heinz says. \u201cI needed to be able to convince the very critical part of myself that there was no chance that what I was finding was not real.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe scheduled a meeting with Bloodgood on 13 April to share what he had uncovered, as much as that scared him. \u201cWhat I was terrified of was the monumental nature of the accusation, in that I was afraid that I would be right, that it would be true, and that many people\u2019s lives and careers would be ruined,\u201d Heinz says. \u201cI was just really feeling the horror\u2014the horror of the consequences of what I\u2019d found.\u201d\r\n\r\nHeinz was also tormented personally. The postdoc was his close friend, he says, and he knew this revelation could destroy his career.\r\n\r\nAt the start of the meeting, Heinz got right to it and told Bloodgood he had found \u201ca really big problem\u201d with the postdoc\u2019s paper.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh no,\u201d Bloodgood remembers saying as a feeling of heaviness sank in.\r\n\r\nHeinz says he walked Bloodgood through his findings, telling her it appeared the postdoc had intentionally falsified the image. Bloodgood \u201cdidn\u2019t disagree\u201d with Heinz\u2019s findings, she says, but she wanted to give the postdoc a chance to explain.\r\n\r\nIn the back of his mind, Heinz had been hoping that Bloodgood would \u201cpoint out the obvious stupidity in what I was saying.\u201d The fact that this didn\u2019t happen shook him, he remembers, but as he was leaving the office, Bloodgood called out to him. He stopped and turned around. \u201cDanny, it might not feel like this now,\u201d he remembers her saying, \u201cbut someday, looking back, you\u2019ll be glad you did this.\u201d\r\n\r\n[tt_sidebar_quote author='Andre DeSouza']I was trying to do something that was just never really going to work.[\/tt_sidebar_quote]\r\n\r\nThe next week, Bloodgood spoke with the postdoc on Zoom. She says she showed him slides with the raw images Heinz had found and the figure from the paper, and she asked for an explanation. The postdoc said it must be a mistake, Bloodgood recalls, though she thought he sounded nervous. \u201cThis nervousness is either because he feels put on the spot,\u201d Bloodgood remembers thinking, or because \u201che feels like he\u2019s been caught.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe postdoc emailed Bloodgood two days later. In that email, Bloodgood says he admitted he had manipulated images in one figure, but he stood by the findings the images represented. And he offered up an excuse: He wrote that he had felt pressure to produce a beautiful paper. But Bloodgood didn\u2019t trust him anymore, she says. She asked him to send a spreadsheet detailing the name and location of every image file that had gone into making the figure and step-by-step instructions on how he had analyzed them. He complied, and Heinz got to work.\r\n\r\nOn 4 May, Bloodgood and her lab met for their weekly lab meeting. Normally, someone presented data from the experiments they had been working on. But that day, Bloodgood broke the news of the manipulated images instead.\r\n\r\nWhen Bloodgood finished speaking, the room fell silent, says Chiaki Santiago<\/a>, a current graduate student in the lab. Santiago says she sensed both sadness and shock in the silence, but also an odd sense of closure. The dendritic NPAS4 antibody experiments had been a \u201ctrap\u201d for years, she says, and now they finally had an answer. The group wasn\u2019t incompetent; they had been chasing a false signal. Knowing that felt at least like \u201ca path forward to truth.\u201d\r\n\r\nBefore the meeting disbanded, Bloodgood gave everyone a chance to ask questions and share reactions. More than one person expressed concern for the postdoc, several people present at the meeting recall: The trainees understood the gravity of what the postdoc had done, and that the consequences could \u201cdevastate a person,\u201d says Anja Payne, a graduate student in the lab at the time. How was he doing? they wondered out loud. Was he suicidal, and did he need an emergency intervention?"},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"Bloodgood, hearing this collective goodwill, felt a \u201chuge warmth to the people in my lab,\u201d she says.\r\n\r\nThen, Santiago says, the lab trainees went out to lunch and took a walk on the beach together. \u201cThat was, like, perfect,\u201d she adds. \u201cIt was very soothing and calming and a great reminder that this isn\u2019t the end-all be-all; we\u2019re going to figure out how to fix this, and we\u2019re going to figure out ways to work through this together.\u201d\r\n\r\n[tt_text class='']W[\/tt_text]eathering someone else\u2019s scientific misconduct can become a\u2014if not the<\/em>\u2014defining moment of a career. For Kate Laskowski<\/a>, it shaped the way she runs her lab.\r\n\r\nToward the end of 2019, Laskowski, assistant professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, had just opened her lab when she discovered that three papers she had published in collaboration with a prominent spider biologist contained falsified data: The biologist had collected the data, and Laskowski had analyzed it. In the end, she retracted the papers and published a blog post<\/a> detailing everything that had happened.\r\n\r\nThe experience did not sour Laskowski\u2019s feelings about science, but it did shape her lab in \u201cprofound ways,\u201d she says. She tells her students, \u201cWe live in a glass house; everything we do is going to be public,\u201d she says. \u201cI never want to relive this. And I know that the only reason I survived is because I was so transparent and open.\u201d For example, her lab manual<\/a> is available on her lab website and outlines detailed expectations for lab notebooks, data storage and analysis, and file organization. The top of the manual states the key mantras: \u201cDon\u2019t be a jerk\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t fabricate\/fudge\/alter data.\u201d\r\n\r\nA close brush with a colleague\u2019s misconduct left Edward Ester<\/a> with a lingering worry. In 2015, a few years after he started a postdoc, he says his former Ph.D. adviser told him a graduate student in the lab\u2014and Ester\u2019s close friend\u2014had been accused of fraud in several of his papers. Ester took a closer look at some of the work he had done with the student, found evidence of data falsification in two papers and retracted them, he says.\r\n\r\nToday Ester is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. When he first opened his lab there, he says he was \u201cvery paranoid\u201d about his trainees making mistakes and spent a lot of time doing data analysis that he should have assigned to a student. Ester\u2019s lab has transparency policies that are similar to Laskowski\u2019s, and even now he finds himself\u00a0\u201cperhaps more of a helicopter [adviser] than I need to be in some instances.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe experience also instilled in him a cynicism about the incentive structure in science, he says. When a scientist\u2019s worth is measured by their h-index and grant dollars, that can \u201cencourage fraud that might not otherwise occur. Because for some people, I think it\u2019s just out of desperation. Or, for some people, it\u2019s a desire to be the best, but they want to get there too fast, or they don\u2019t care how they get there,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you create perverse incentives, you\u2019re going to create perverse behaviors.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Ester doesn\u2019t let this awareness ruin his daily experience as a scientist, he says. He keeps his attention focused on his own work and his own lab, which is the only thing he can control. The structural flaws necessitate \u201ca lot of vigilance\u201d from individual researchers to ensure fraud doesn\u2019t occur.\r\n\r\nThese consequences are amplified when the person faking data is a principal investigator. In 2005, a group of molecular biology graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered their PI had faked data<\/a> in several grant applications. After months of deliberation, they turned her in, and the lab was shut down. Three of the students left with their master\u2019s degrees. Three others switched to new labs to finish their Ph.D.s, including Mary Ann Allen<\/a>, who says she initially wanted to leave research and get a computer science degree instead, because she couldn\u2019t imagine trusting another stranger to be her adviser.\r\n\r\n[tt_sidebar_quote author='Mary Ann Allen']I was under the impression nobody committed misconduct. And then you go through this situation, and you start to wonder if everybody does.[\/tt_sidebar_quote]\r\n\r\nShe stayed in biology only because a friend recommended his former adviser at the University of Colorado Boulder, she says. Allen moved to the new lab and is now a research associate professor at the university\u2019s BioFrontiers Institute. She migrated from molecular biology into computational biology (in part, she says, because of the field\u2019s data- and code-sharing norms), teaches responsible conduct of research courses to trainees and upholds transparency policies in her own lab.\r\n\r\nHer trust in other scientists still ebbs and flows. \u201cI was under the impression nobody committed misconduct. And then you go through this situation, and you start to wonder if everybody does,\u201d Allen says.\r\n\r\n[tt_text class='']A[\/tt_text]s Heinz worked through the reanalysis of the postdoc\u2019s paper, it became clear that hundreds of images were not accounted for in the spreadsheet the postdoc had sent, Bloodgood says. She asked the postdoc to send the missing images, and a few weeks later, on 9 June, he did.\r\n\r\nYet when Heinz looked at the images\u2019 metadata\u2014the immutable bits of information marking when an image was taken, and on what microscope\u2014he discovered that what Bloodgood describes as \u201can overwhelming majority\u201d had been taken within the past few weeks. The postdoc, it seemed, had faked more data to cover his tracks. This was awful news, Bloodgood says, but it carried an \u201cecho of relief,\u201d because it meant the group could stop investigating. Nothing could be explained away, and it left Bloodgood with only one choice, she says.\r\n\r\nBloodgood called an emergency meeting on Thursday, 15 June. Santiago, Heinz, Payne and the other trainees piled into Bloodgood\u2019s office around her computer, and she broke the news. The postdoc could not be relied on to help correct the paper, she told them; it had to be retracted. Also, Bloodgood said she had emailed the postdoc and told him that on the next Tuesday she would notify the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Cell, <\/em>her department chair and his department chair about what he had done. If he wanted to be the one to tell his chair, he would need to do so before then.\r\n\r\nFor Heinz, the discovery of the second fraud shifted him from \u201cfeeling guilt to feeling anger,\u201d he says. If you give someone an opportunity to fix a mistake, and \u201cthey try to take advantage of you, that\u2019s a different level of betrayal.\u201d\r\n\r\nBloodgood was angry, too, she says. \u201cIt didn\u2019t have to be this way,\u201d she remembers thinking. \u201cThere are so many interesting things to discover in biology. You don\u2019t have to make things up.\u201d\r\n\r\nOn 15 June 2023, the postdoc confessed to the University of Utah, according to an \u201cadmission of research misconduct\u201d statement and the university\u2019s misconduct report<\/a>, which The Transmitter <\/em>obtained through a public records request. He admitted to manipulating images of NPAS4 using Photoshop, and he admitted to fabricating data in a set of genetic knockout experiments he never performed. He also admitted to incorporating fabricated data throughout the paper to increase the sample size of different experiments. He then used the fraudulent data in several NIH grant applications that led to more than $1.4 million in funding, and in his job application talk that landed him an assistant professor position. Finally, he admitted to sending Bloodgood images that he took after the paper was published \u201cin an initial attempt to conceal my misconduct,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn truth, this misrepresentation was a falsification of the research record.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe University of Utah and UCSD conducted separate investigations, and both found<\/a> that the postdoc had committed research misconduct, as did the U.S. Office of Research Integrity<\/a> (ORI). The postdoc resigned from his position and entered a voluntary settlement agreement with the ORI\u2014he agreed to be supervised by two to three senior faculty members for the next five years when conducting federally funded research.\r\n\r\nOn 12 June 2024, Bloodgood and the postdoc\u2019s other co-authors retracted the 2019 paper<\/a> from Cell<\/em>, after UCSD concluded its investigation. \u201cWe do not stand by the conclusions drawn in this paper and are retracting it,\u201d the retraction notice states. \u201cWe apologize to the scientific community for any loss of time, resources, and\/or morale caused by this publication.\u201d\r\n\r\n[tt_text class='']W[\/tt_text]hen people trust someone, they make themselves vulnerable to being hurt, says Karen Frost-Arnold<\/a>, professor of philosophy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Philosophers describe the feeling that comes from someone taking advantage of that vulnerability as \u201cdisrespected in your personhood,\u201d Frost-Arnold says. \u201cIt can feel very dehumanizing.\u201d\r\n\r\nOne component of the healing process involves trying to understand why the betrayal happened, Frost-Arnold says. The betrayed look at themselves and wonder why they trusted the wrong person. They look at the betrayer and try to decipher their motivations. If the motivations are unclear, they may chalk it up to a random act of cruelty from a bad person. And lastly, they look at structures and institutions\u2014what is it about science in general, or their lab specifically, that allowed this to happen?"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image_comp","aspect_ratio":"inline","title":"","image":218499,"link":"","image_caption":"Upward spiral:<\/strong> Members of the Bloodgood Lab are still processing the repercussions of the fraud.","image_byline":{"by":"","credit":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"In the 18 months since the postdoc\u2019s fabrication came to light, members of Bloodgood\u2019s lab have wrestled through what happened to them and what it means for the rest of their careers. Heinz can\u2019t write off the whole episode as a bad person being bad, because he knew the postdoc to be good, thoughtful and caring, he says. \u201cThis is not just, \u2018There are some bad apples.\u2019 It\u2019s this specific person who I couldn\u2019t have believed could have done this, did this. And it forces a different interrogation of the causality.\u201d\r\n\r\nInstead, Heinz has taken a close look at the scientific institution. He views its incentive structure as a \u201cmoral hazard\u201d for scientists, he says, because it tells them that the only way to advance is to take big swings, but most big swings are misses, not home runs. So some may feel compelled to cut corners or fudge results to propel their status and career. Heinz sees a system in which labs push toward \u201cpersonal brand goals\u201d instead of biological truths. He loves being a scientist, he says, but he\u2019s not sure if he can protect himself from the dissonance that comes from existing within the scientific world. Heinz hopes to defend his Ph.D. at the end of the year, and he doesn\u2019t know yet what he\u2019ll do next. He says he wants to do something that feels like a valuable contribution to society\u2014maybe that\u2019s in science; maybe it isn\u2019t. But \u201cI almost certainly would have been doing a postdoc if all of this hadn\u2019t happened.\u201d\r\n\r\nBloodgood is still working through what lessons might be generalizable, she says. She doesn\u2019t want to treat all of her trainees like they may be faking data, because \u201cit would be terribly unfair to them, and it would be an awful way for me to go through my life.\u201d Still, her baseline trust in other scientists has dropped, she says, and she finds herself less confident in someone\u2019s results when she perceives them to be an ambitious person.\r\n\r\nThe fraud in her lab has \u201cextinguished a spark that I had for science,\u201d Bloodgood says, and reigniting it has been \u201celusive.\u201d\r\n\r\nSantiago says she has also lost that spark. Last summer, when all of this took place, she had an internship at Neurocrine Biosciences. She noticed that when the Neurocrine scientists tried to replicate a finding reported in the academic literature, it often failed. This observation, combined with the fraud unfolding in her home lab, caused Santiago to lose faith in academia. Industry incentivizes rigor, she says, because drugs are tested in humans, and vast amounts of money are at stake. But in academia, she sees researchers wed themselves to exciting stories that might not be true.\r\n\r\nAfter the internship, while attending a seminar at UCSD by a visiting professor, she remembers thinking, \u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s real.\u201d Later that semester, she read a grant she had written for an assignment a few years prior. Her writing carried both excitement and pride as she described the lab\u2019s work and the experiments she planned to do. She had even used an exclamation point. As she reread her old writing, Santiago says she realized that enthusiastic version of herself was gone, and the realization made her cry.\r\n\r\nYet she hasn\u2019t lost all hope. After the second meeting with the lab, that terrible one in which the members learned that the postdoc had continued to fake data, Santiago left campus and drove north on Interstate 5 to get back to her internship. She had 30 minutes until her next meeting, so she exited the highway and made a detour to Bird Rock Coffee, a coffee shop across the street from where the marshland meets the beach. Santiago remembers she sat on a stool on the patio, drank her coffee, stared at a great blue heron that was hanging out in the marsh and wondered absently about how much energy it took for the bird to stand on one leg. And this moment, she says, somehow reassured her that everything was going to be alright.\r\n\r\nFor Payne, it took months to fully process the postdoc\u2019s fraud, she says. The events unfolded not long before she was to defend her thesis and move across the country to Virginia, to start a postdoc at the Janelia Research Campus. She remembers sitting in Bloodgood\u2019s office, thinking, \u201cI can\u2019t internalize this right now.\u201d Her main thought was to defend, graduate and \u201cget out, get out, get out,\u201d she says.\r\n\r\nAt first, Payne says, she had felt compassion for the postdoc. \u201cTruthfully, my reaction to it was a little bit this sense of like, \u2018There but for the grace of God go I,\u2019\u201d she says. But in Virginia, when it was over and she had physically left it behind, she had more time to think. Then she started to feel angry. By October, she felt afraid\u2014she worried that there was \u201csomething missing about my understanding of science,\u201d she says. She had once felt that all scientists had \u201cthe same goals,\u201d but after the fraud she doubted that.\r\n\r\nPayne says she realized that she was grieving\u2014something she had experienced when her brother died during her first quarter of graduate school. In the aftermath of that loss, she joined a graduate student grief group at UCSD to help herself cope. Eventually, she began to facilitate the group alongside a counselor.\r\n\r\nWhile leading that group, she says she learned that working through grief is not about fully healing\u2014the loss of her brother might forever feel raw. Instead, what she needed was to find a way to tolerate the wound in her life. \u201cYou truly do just have to get to a place of acceptance or go crazy. There\u2019s not an in-between,\u201d she says.\r\n\r\nPayne says she doesn\u2019t expect to understand why the postdoc did what he did, and she also does not expect that her attitudes about science will look the same as they did before. She considers her recovery from the fraud to be an \u201cupward spiral\u201d that will vary each day and won\u2019t be linear.\r\n\r\nNow, she says, she sees that the only thing she can control is the rigor of her own work. There is no way to prevent fraud. This realization is still painful at times, but she has accepted it. \u201cIt is just, unfortunately, a feature of humanity that we have to contend with,\u201d she says. You have to \u201clook the beast in its ugly face.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, help is available. Here is a worldwide directory of resources and hotlines<\/a>\u00a0that you can call for support.<\/em>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"newsletter","title":"Sign up for our weekly newsletter.","subtitle":"Catch up on what you may have missed from our recent coverage.","bg_image":200913,"groups":[{"group":"4","name":"","hide_checkbox":true}],"linktext":"","linkurl":""}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216553"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218855,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216553\/revisions\/218855"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor\/107167"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor\/218382"}],"acf:term":[{"embeddable":true,"taxonomy":"post_tag","href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags\/207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}