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Posted on 2024-10-06
I read an article on fraud in academia this morning that stirred up some thoughts and emotions in me on how much of a racket meritocracy in the university can be.
"A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery." by Calli McMurray
In short, a postdoc in biology falsified data to a huge degree, and got a huge sack of cash and associate professor position in reward. At his old lab, PhD students burned themselves out of the program trying to replicate the data until one person realized the results were fraudulent, and the impact of that revelation on the group. Naturally, the former-postdoc's career blew up.
I hate to say it, but my gut reaction at the start of the article was sympathy for the postdoc. There's no reason to ever commit fraud, that's for sure, but academia is so precarious. The standards for success in a field are ambiguous and always increasing, and so many of the things that determine if a researcher will succeed, especially early in their career, is out of their control.
You need to have the right kind of topic. There are plenty of questions you could investigate, but if it isn't trendy (or you can't tell a story of how it connects to a trend) at the time of publication, you already have a major disadvantage.
Your results need to be interesting. You can't know what results you will get before investing all of your time into a project, of course, but if you don't get something novel then you fail. Keep in mind that, if you have funding, you probably do not have funding long enough to start a project over if you hit a dead end. There is no incentive to the university or your department to keep you around after this point.
You need to have a good team. You probably won't have a ton of say in what happens to your teammates, but if one of them disappears then congratulations, your plan is now in disarray. If you're lucky, your grant is long enough to replace this person. You're probably not that lucky.
You need to have a great supervisor. You're still learning how to do research and the use the many "soft skills" of academia, so hopefully this person gives you timely and constructive feedback. If you don't get that, you will eventually learn from your mistakes, but you probably don't have time to change your trajectory.
You need to avoid logistical and bureaucratic problems. Did your ethics application get lost for months? Did equipment you need break before you were able to complete your study? Does your university actually reimburse your expenses quickly enough that you're able to spend money on anything?
I don't think I even need to get into how being anything but a cishet white guy from a wealthy family of academics works against you.
That isn't to say nothing is within your control, but academia is a place where you can do everything right, fail, and hear people wax poetic about how good work is rewarded. Meanwhile, I eat lunch with smart, creative, inquisitive people who move halfway around the world to take temporary positions in the hopes that one day they'll get the kind of stability where they can adopt a cat. That's terrible. I can't help but sympathize with people working under these conditions. It shouldn't be unremarkable for people early in their careers to just break down sobbing because they feel themselves caught on the gears of the system and know they will be crushed if they can't just find some way to get out, ideally without having wasted years of their life.
Most of those people do just simply not commit fraud, of course. It does take a special kind of person to lie to their friends and peers, take hundreds of thousands or millions of public dollars, and say "keep trying" as they watch others wear themselves down on a hopeless task. This isn't to mention the kind of public harm that can come from lying about something like Alzheimer's research. But it's also disgusting to set up a system where any semblance of stability requires constant luck rather than it just being the absolute minimum.