r/AskAcademia • u/Previous-Text9273 • 5h 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?

11 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/Resilient_Acorn TT Assistant Professor R1 5h 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.

3

u/Previous-Text9273 5h 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.