Plausible Accuracy

This is the story of a scientific ethics incident. The names have been obscured, but the events are true. I know because I was part of the lab group it involves.

I’ll be telling this story in 3 parts, which I’ll link here when they are written.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Part Three: “What do we do now?”

The bombshell had dropped.  Dr. C’s students now knew that, within several months, their lab would no longer exist.  They still didn’t know why, and no one who knew was talking.   In addition to trying to make sense of what had caused this sequence of events, the lab members were now also thrown headfirst into a very practical concern: salvaging their careers as best they could.  In the end, the justification for the firing of Dr. C would be an ancillary issue.

For about a week or so, no one did much of anything in Dr. C’s lab.  They sent overtures to Dr. C in the form of letters and emails, which were met with little to no response.  The word was that Dr. C was distraught and angry, and couldn’t face the students.   Quickly they realized that they couldn’t wait for an explanation; it was time to go into damage control mode and recover as best as they could.

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This is the story of a scientific ethics incident. The names have been obscured, but the events are true. I know because I was part of the lab group it involves.

I’ll be telling this story in 3 parts, which I’ll link here when they are written.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Part Two: “There will be a meeting”

Months had passed since the computer incident of Part One.  Things in Dr. C’s lab had returned more or less to normal, with the day-to-day drudgery typical of research pushing aside any misgivings about what was going on outside of the lab.  There hadn’t been any further incidents to raise suspicion, so it was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” for those working in the lab.
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This is the story of a scientific ethics incident.  The names have been obscured, but the events are true.  I know because I was part of the lab group it involves.

I’ll be telling this story in 3 parts, which I’ll link here when they are written.

Part One | Part Two | Part 3

Part One: “We need these computers”

Dr. C was a relatively young professor at a major research institution.  His lab was situated in a cross-disciplinary biotech building situated about a quarter of a mile away from the main campus.  Although Dr. C wasn’t yet tenured, he seemed to be on the track to a very successful career in academia.  The lab’s research focused on G Protein-coupled Receptors, a very hot family of proteins that were the subject of intense research both in pharmaceutical companies as well as university and small biotech labs.  The reason for the interest in these proteins was simple: scientists knew that they were involved in a huge variety of pathways in the body - pathways that led to medical conditions.  If they could figure out how to influence these pathways by treating the G Protein-coupled Receptors with drugs, then there would be serious money to be made.  The stakes and the pressure were high.  Pharmaceuticals acting on GPCRs were already making companies billions of dollars a year, and the gold rush was on.

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