I believe that every scientific researcher who has been deeply engaged in the laboratory for many years has a profound experience: experiment is a very mysterious thing, and failure is a common thing.
Theory, you understand everything but can't do it;
The experiment was made but did not understand why;
In our lab, it's all in one:
I can't do it, and I don't understand why.
But jokes are jokes, and some of the reasons why experiments can't be done are better to figure out as soon as possible, especially like this one:
Your classmates deliberately pour alcohol into your medium.
A lingering nightmare
Nature has reported such an outrageous incident. In December 2009, Heather Ames, a medical doctoral student at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, began to suspect that something was wrong with her research.
She was working on an epidermal growth factor receptor that required western blot analysis (WB) to analyze the proteins in the sample.
WB is arguably a familiar operation for biomedical practitioners, and you never know what kind of failure result you will get - whether it is a crooked strip, or if you have done every step, the result film is cleaner than the face.
Ames was no exception, and when she looked at the blot, she found that four out of six samples appeared to have problems, and the expected bands appeared on the wrong lane.
WB, failure is normal, but the problem is that after five days, Ames has fixed all the experimental procedures that may be flawed, and the exact same failure results are once again in front of her.
"I admit that I may still have technical errors, but it's really strange that two experiments went wrong in exactly the same way."
But then, Ames noticed one detail: the label lid of the medium had been replaced with something else. Ames began to wonder if someone was deliberately sabotaging her experiment. Even if this suspicion was only speculation, she wrote on the bottom of her petri dish to be on the safe side.
But in the following experiments, Ames' WB experiment had more strange problems. An extra band repeatedly appeared in the blotting results, which meant that an other protein appeared in her sample. And such problems have appeared more than once.
Ames was clueless, she felt increasingly anxious, and her intuition told her that someone must be deliberately sabotaging her experiment; But she had neither evidence nor suspicion. She also tried to analyze her speculation with friends and relatives, but everyone felt that she just couldn't accept her failure.
Ames
As we all know, some top large laboratories are indeed very serious, in addition to pressure between the same door is competition, it is really impossible to say which opponent will play tricks behind the scenes;
But Ames's lab is not at all - under the leadership of a Buddhist PI, there is only one graduate student, a few undergraduates, a research assistant of a "nine-year veteran", and a cutting-edge postdoc who has just arrived for a few days.
Such failures plagued Ames for 3 months until February 2010, when Ames was changing the medium on the cells, something even stranger happened - the cells were all floating, as if they had been corroded.
Ames took the bottle of freshly used medium from the cabinet and looked closely—translucent ripples were clearly visible in the crimson medium, like a liquor hanging from a glass when shaking ice whiskey. And when Ames opened the cap, the pungent smell of alcohol came to his face.
That's the proof I need, Ames thought.
The curtain slowly lifted
Ames immediately sent an email to the lab PI, Theo Ross. Faced with this bottle of culture medium that was on the top of the bottle, Ross didn't know what to do.
Ross consulted a number of others — all trying to convince Ross — that Ames was just making excuses for his own failures.
Professor Ross
But looking at Ames, who was desperate but full of determination, Ross chose to report the matter to the school's general superintendent's office.
The office hasn't dealt with anything like this, and it doesn't seem to want to deal with it. After dragging on for nearly half a month, the office "reluctantly" contacted the school police; And the school police quickly launched an investigation — but it was an investigation against Ames.
Ames recalls, she went through two interrogations and a lie detector test before investigators finally figured out they should go to the lab for evidence.
In short, more than a month later, the school police took advantage of midnight to install two stealth cameras in the laboratory, one in the cold room where Ames' experiment failed, and one next to the cupboard where the bottle of media was stored.
Ames worked until 5 p.m. that day, and when she returned to the lab at 10 a.m. the next day, her medium once again smelled pungent.
While viewing the surveillance video, both Ames and Ross's hearts sank.
The postdoc in the lab, Vipul Bhrigu, walked to the cupboard with a bottle of ethanol an hour before Ames returned to the lab the next day.
Brigou photographed by surveillance
Brigu was interrogated by school police. When he heard that a camera was installed in the laboratory, Brigu lowered his gaze, quietly drank the water in the cup in front of him, and then confessed everything.
Evil for no reason
Brigu came to the United States from India in 2003 and completed his doctorate at the University of Toledo. Ross felt that he was a very nice young man — friendly, talkative, and very knowledgeable about the frontiers of the field. "He may not be the kind of lab star, but at least the work he does has always been impeccable."
Brigu
And Ames? She even likes this "excellent senior". When she first counted who might frame her, Brigu didn't even rank up at all—"He's one of the people I least doubt."
As mentioned earlier, there is no "same-door competition" between Brigu and Ames - they don't even have the same scope of work. As for the lab, PI Ross has always been known for her Buddhist lineage: "She just wants to do science," a former graduate student of Ross's described as "her lab is even relieved of pressure from the research system."
Brigu said going to the bigger school did put him under a lot of pressure, and some of Ross's criticism of his inadequacies also frustrated him; But he deliberately sabotages other people's experiments because of these emotions:
"I'm just jealous of other people moving forward, I want them to slow down."
After the hustle and bustle
The court sentenced Brigu to pay all wasted lab reagents and materials, including six months of probation. Before the hearings began, however, Brigou left the United States and returned to India.
But the impact on Ross and Ames was enormous, and Brigu spent a year in Ross's lab, which meant that all the results he had made had to be repeated again to preserve authenticity, and all the reagents he had handled had to be replaced with new ones.
And Ames, a graduate student who was 29 years old at the time, was already worried about graduation, and because of Brigu's behavior, she had to choose Yanbi...
After this, Ross became less willing to hire students or hire people, and considered abandoning her research project altogether. She even began to question her sanity, worried about whether she was too credulous of others, and tirelessly exhorted other PIs to "pay attention to human diversity in the laboratory."
Ross also called Brigu's former mentor at the University of Toledo and was surprised to find that Brigu had been rehired there—the University of Michigan, which he claimed was forced to leave because Ross was at odds with him. Of course, the University of Toledo quickly ousted him.
Today, Brigu, who has returned to India, is still thriving in the scientific research community;
The good news is that Ames didn't give up his career in science because of the blow and is now an assistant professor of pathology at the University of Maryland.
Write at the end
Academic misconduct is nothing new, but its frequency is hard to measure.
Daniele Fanelli, who studies academic misconduct at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, said malicious crimes like Brigou's exposed may be rare, but other forms of indecency and vandalism may be more common in the lab. "More situations than you can't capture with a camera."
Malicious retaliatory peer reviews, fraudulent letters of recommendation, or concealment of critical steps from peers or competitors are as serious a blow to the research project and the entire scientific career as they are to sabotage the experiment. To be honest, even these practices seem to be quite common in the scientific community.
Some people believe that the fundamental culprit of these behaviors is the corporatized scientific research system. Tenure-track faculty, popular projects, top papers, all of which are won through competition.
To succeed, researchers stop minding themselves if they get better – they just need to be better than their opponents.
Sociologist Brian Martinson argues that this attitude must be the trigger for laboratory vandalism. Universities and research institutions must confront this pressure in the research system and work to alleviate it by channeling and providing assistance, rather than simply punishing the perpetrators after the incident.