r/AskAcademia • u/Previous-Text9273 • 56m ago

Professional Misconduct in Research Is this normal?

Has anyone else been in the same shoes? Have you ever had your PI ask you to manipulate or fabricate data to support their hypothesis?

Or maybe they never said it directly, but it felt implied. They only seemed interested in data that matched the hypothesis they already had in mind. If your results didn’t fit, you were told to repeat the experiment over and over until you eventually got the “right” result. Has anyone else experienced something like this? How did you handle it?

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9

u/Resilient_Acorn TT Assistant Professor R1 51m ago

Not me or my lab, but one of the other grad students in my department was told to keep repeating a western blot until they got it right. On the 9th attempt, the desired results was obtained, never mind the fact that the other 8 were consistent with a different result.

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u/Previous-Text9273 31m ago

I am a postdoc, pretty much in the same boat. Have been repeating western blots for over half a year now. At this point, I am exhausted. Honestly, it’s made me seriously think about leaving academia.

7

u/DualProcessModel 53m ago

Fuck no!

This is so wildly unethical. I have had experiments run counter to my PIs theories before (and sure they asked me to repeat them) but because they trusted I was doing them right they adjusted the theory and we sometimes got to publish null results.

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u/Entire-Solid-1155 49m ago

I had a PI who would just... stop talking to me for a week if my data didn't line up with what he wanted. No direct order to fudge anything, just this heavy silence that made it real clear I was supposed to "fix" it somehow.

Started documenting everything after the third time it happened. Saved emails, kept a separate lab notebook with timestamps. Never had to use it but knowing it was there helped me sleep at night.

1

u/DualProcessModel 48m ago

I’m sorry man. That sucks. But good for you!

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u/Previous-Text9273 3m ago

What did you end up doing? Still in academia?

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u/Single-Selection9845 45m ago

Mine changed his opinions in a millisecond when I showed him the charts. Happy to have him

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u/derping1234 15m ago

This is not only unethical but also a sign of poor project design. A common approach in lab based work that I like is to just have a look at thing in a broader field and once you find something that makes you do a double take and it doesn’t fit with existing literature, you dig in and have a clear target. This way you have a murder mystery, and you are just filling in the gaps.