Malice.

Derek Lowe links to a truly disturbing case that gave me a sympathetic lurch in the gut.

Imagine that you're a graduate student and your laboratory results don't work.

Now imagine that you can't figure out why they don't work.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it wasn't too hard for me to "imagine" that.

OK, now, suppose that you begin to suspect... sabotage. 

Can you imagine actually going to your PI and saying, "I can't get my stuff to work, and I think it's because someone's out to get me?"

Me either.  I'd probably start to doubt my own sanity first.

Fortunately for Heather Ames at the University of Michigan, she had the self-confidence to get to the bottom of it all, and in the end a postdoc in the lab was caught on camera tampering with Ms. Ames's research.

The headline on the linked article seems off to me -- I'd say this is "the scientific side of malice" rather than the "malicious side of science" -- but whew, definitely worth reading.  One thing that's interesting is that sabotage doesn't quite fit the established definition of "research misconduct."  May be time to expand that definition.  Having his name appear in Nature like this (not what he'd hoped for I'm sure) seems an apt punishment.

Comments

[Erin]

I'm nearly speechless. I don't think sabotage would have crossed my mind. And I would have been hard pressed to question a postdoc if I had any suspicions.