midatl

Hi, I'm in research (and could hazard a good guess at who you are). I'm at the post-doc stage of my career and have been encountering many of the same issues. I've even personally engaged in some stuff that, looking back, wasn't even close to the right way to do the science but was what needed to be done to make manuscripts and grants and prestige for my boss. I feel. So. Guilty. I can't even describe the loathing and shame. I hate myself and my career and I contemplate dark things. This isn't for sympathy; I made some bad choices. But honestly, I dove in to science with all the wonder and zeal of a kid who grew up on Mister Wizard. I'm not even totally sure what all happened. And in reality, I didn't even do anything that I don't see happening all over the place, everywhere I've ever worked. Not everyone cherry picks and conveniently excludes data points for b.s. reasons, but once you know to suspect it and what the signs are, you start to recognize it disturbingly often. And then you see the system that we have in place that enables it, from hotshot whip-cracking PIs "training" exhausted grad students basically at gunpoint to journals that want to sweep the problem under the rug. And a circlejerking funding mechanism that depends on it and an ivory tower that refuses to embrace the openness and technology required to combat it. It's shocking and it's got me ashamed of this whole enterprise.

I think I want out, but it may be too late for me. I think people really underestimate how of the research record is irreproducible, anomolous, heavily massaged, or just plain fabricated crap. Thanks for being so much braver than I can be right now.

Thanks for your advice. If I were to give all the details, there would probably be a lot of people here who'd be understanding and maybe even forgiving. But I honestly don't think I could survive the shame of coming forward and admitting the fact that yes, I was a part of the problem. Did I ever just manufacture data? Absolutely not. But that and the fact that cherry picking and tossing out "bad" experiments happens everywhere doesn't make me feel any better about my own compromised integrity now. Every time incidents do make the press, when you read about someone's paper getting retracted or an investigation into something, the pitchforks come out and everyone's so quick to talk about "bad apples" so we can keep on pretending that this problem isn't pervasive by just shaming the people who get caught from the back of our cozy gravy train. We love picking low-hanging-fruit like blot photoshoppers and plagarizers. And of course nothing ever changes. Where's the transparency? Where's the data sharing? I don't have the citation off hand, but there was a study recently that showed that even when going through the official data sharing procedures that many journals require compliance with, rarely can an investigator get all the data, materials and procedural details they need to reproduce published work from the original authors. This is exactly the kind of thing Al Gore invented the internet for, yet people fight tooth-and-nail to enable and preserve this archaic system we have that allows data to be carefully spooned out in little digestible bites only by the people who generated it, so that if something's off, it won't be discovered until the paper's old and everyone's moved on to new projects and new jobs.

There's nothing I can do about it now; just do the best I can at a job I hate. This is what I've trained for and all I know. I don't know who else would hire me with the education, skills and experience I have besides a research lab. I've got family members (not children) depending on me and my income. I do my current work to the highest standards that I can so that I can at least look myself in the mirror and keep my brain completely inside my skull for another day. I'm a model inmate in my own mental prision.

I wish I could go back to grad school and tell myself it's not worth it. Every. Day. It is the biggest regret of my life. Like you, I'd plead to any aspiring scientist to cling to your integrity and the integrity of your science with all your might, and get the hell away from people who'd let you do differently. But I think I'm too far gone. I just feel so broken.