Fraud for Science

It is often said that a person loses his or her virginity only once,

and afterwards cannot reclaim it (though nowadays operations are available to revirginate accidental female ex-virgins). But while losing your physical virginity is generally something that by definition occurs only once, your mental virginity is often lost several times. You hear that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, find child-porn under the bed of your favourite uncle, or discover that the admired director of your favourite charity steers a very large amount of your donations to his favourite charity, being a summer house in Hawaii and a 60-foot yacht.

Perhaps it is the only possible fate of ideals to fall. But it can be very painful when they do so.

Today, I was visited by one of my fellow PhD-students, who showed me the reviews of the research proposal he had written (and our promotor had submitted under his own name). I had long been aware that there was some fishy business about this proposal, but today the smell became too strong for me to ignore.

The colleague I am talking about (I will not disclose his name for reasons which may be obvious from the rest of my story) is a very smart young scientist. When he had been in our group for a few months, he developed a very clever idea to improve upon an existing bioinformatics method. Though I aided in developing the idea (and debugging the software), the idea was mostly his, and we got very nice results. It was cute, clever science, and I would have been very proud of it had it been my own work. The project was finished in one month, then about two months were spent on writing the article (intermittently with other research, of course), and was set for publication.

But this was not to be.

Around the time when my colleague wanted to submit it to a bioinformatics journal, our promotor read about special Dutch bioinformatics fellowships. You could send the committee a project proposal, and if they found it interesting, they would grant the submitter money to hire a postdoc for nine months to do it. Of course, this was not an opportunity to be missed. All computational PhD-students (including myself) were called upon to write proposals. I myself did not succeed, being more of a cheminformatician and finding I had too little knowledge of the current state and problems of bioinformatics to think of something interesting, but my colleagues were able to, promped by our promotor. Actually, the professor had a very simple method to generate ideas: submit a proposal to ask for a grant for research you have already done but not published yet. So my colleague was encouraged to write about his research as if it had to be done yet, and elaborate on it with all kinds of extraneous and probably superfluous activities to make it seem to last nine months. Of course, if the money was received, we could do other important things with it. And unfortunately, publishing was out of the question for now.

Today, my colleague came to visit me with the reviews. One was bad, one was reasonable, and one was supportive. So unfortunately he still cannot publish since our professor still has hope that a good defense of the proposal might allow us to get the money.

From this affair I get a sort of queasy feeling. Of course, when I questioned my professor about the appropriateness and ethics of this behaviour, I got the same answer as any time I ask whether doing the things he prescribes us are ethical. “Everybody does it”. While I can imagine that multiple people do it, for some reason that does not convince me that it is right. Perhaps this is an unfortunate consequence from my early highschool years, when I was bullied by several classmates, and “everyone” in my class seemed to accept these proceedings. Of course, there were several of them, and only one of me, but despite that it somehow still did not feel right.

Of course it is nice to have the ideal of science of striving to uncover the truth of the universe, with the only desire for truth, disregarding the consequences to the scientist him- or herself. It is bad enough to see many scientists wasting their energy on squabbling and bickering about ancient feuds that were started by their promotor’s promotors, slicing and dicing articles down to the “least publishable unit”, creating reviews by copy-pasting abstracts, and demanding of PhD-students with bright ideas to keep their mouth shut since the professor might want to start a company. But to delay publication of an interesting and perhaps important article for a year or more, to ask for money when you have no idea yet on what you want to do with it, to spend inordinate amounts of times writing a proposal for something that you have already done instead of creating and executing new ideas, and misleading a committee into believing that the research has not been performed yet and you need the sparse money of the scholarships to achieve it while someone else might have genuine a good research idea that would really need that money to be executed...

Of course I may be as bad as the others for knowing this but not making it known to the committee, somewhat as the evil of the first mate of captain Ahab in "Moby Dick" was not that he was not a good man, but that he lacked the courage to stop his insane boss. And it may truly be a prevalent phenomenon, one of my other colleagues, overhearing our conversation, made the remark that it was also typical of companies. “Its just necessary for survival”.

Which reminds me of Shaw’s remark that the more you defend a necessary evil, the more and more it seems necessary and the less and less it seems evil.

Sometimes it is said that if people spent as much effort in correcting their faults as they do in hiding them from others, the world would be a much happier place.

Perhaps it’s all just a game, and I am just a sort of prudish prig who would, like Dicken’s Thomas Gradgrind, object on having horses on wallpaper because real horses don’t walk up and down the sides of rooms. Am I overreacting, like the old Catholic school posters showing the four sins that get boys in hell: robbery, arson, murder and not going to church on Sundays? Can I blame my professor just because he wants what is best for our group – money? And can I blame my colleague who is just following orders? Do the ends justify the means? Should we just put the blame on the funding committee on encouraging these kinds of behaviour – after all, you get what you reward. Should we say that since my colleague is a brilliant young scientist, the money will go toward a good purpose, as a sort of reward and further encouragement? All these things may be true, but should we really want science to be this way? Should we strive to live so? Could we really close our eyes on our deathbed with a contented smile on our lips, whispering the happy words "we sure fooled them bigtime"?

Difficult questions. Would I bend or burst?

For me, I see no real choice but to go on, releasing my illusions but keeping my ideals, hoping that however I might disagree with some kinds of behaviour, I will always try to do what I think is right for the world, not just for myself. Let's pray that I’ll be able to do so.



Thought of the day (of a previous day actually, but still a very good thought)

The character you display is often the result of the beliefs you have about yourself, others and the world. If you believe that other people are sensitive and easily offended, you will become a shy person. If you believe that there is only one way to live and that you are doing it, you will become rigid and unpleasant. But perhaps this also works the other way around: if we choose to believe that mistakes do not kill us, we might become braver, more playful and relaxed. If we believe that other people are fundamentally OK, we become more accepting and friendlier, and may even gain friends. Behaviour can follow beliefs.

Exercise for today: List your own behaviours that annoy you and try to deduce the beliefs that seem to cause/encourage them. Then look whether these beliefs are realistic. Then look at how you want to be, and what you would have to believe to be so. Then see if you can convince yourself by thinking and doing experiments that those good beliefs are mostly true. We should never become stupid, but very often we get what we expect, so it is better to expect the best.