Whistleblowing: the community’s response.

In my last post, I examined the efforts of Elizabeth Goodwin’s genetics graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal responsibly with their worries that their advisor was falsifying data. I also reported that, even though they did everything you’d want responsible whistleblowers to do, it exacted a serious price from them. As the Science article on the case [1] noted,

Although the university handled the case by the book, the graduate students caught in the middle have found that for all the talk about honesty’s place in science, little good has come to them. Three of the students, who had invested a combined 16 years in obtaining their Ph.D.s, have quit school. Two others are starting over, one moving to a lab at the University of Colorado, extending the amount of time it will take them to get their doctorates by years. The five graduate students who spoke with Science also described discouraging encounters with other faculty members, whom they say sided with Goodwin before all the facts became available.

In this post, I examine the community-level features that may have stacked the deck against the UW whistleblowers. Then, I suggest some ways to change the academic culture — especially they department culture — so that budding scientists don’t have to make a choice between standing up for scientific integrity and getting to have a career in science.

When Goodwin’s students contacted their department chair, Michael Culbertson, to share their suspicions that something was badly amiss with the data in Goodwin’s grant application, they were fearful of what they were setting in motion.
Because they were being careful not to compromise the confidentiality of the investigation, they could only talk to the faculty members and administrators doing the investigating, and to each other — not to friends in other labs, not to other faculty in their department. They were essentially isolated from any sense of community their department might have provided them.
Worse, it looks like the faculty in their department reflexively circled the wagons. In the absence of details of the inquiry, given the choice between siding with their colleague or with her graduate students who had instigated the inquiry, they sided with their colleague. This seems understandable: faculty generally have a longer lifespan in a department than do graduate students, so your ties to your colleagues feel more durable. They tend to be closer to you in terms of career stage and shared experience (such as getting through graduate school). They understand the sorts of responsibilities and pressures that their colleagues must juggle, because they’re juggling them too.
Students, on the other hand, don’t really know what it’s like yet to really be a grown up scientist. Sometimes they can seem idealistic and naïve, lacking in perspective. They get pretty good at doing their experiments, but they don’t know what it’s like to have to keep the grant money rolling in to keep the lab in business.
Undoubtedly, they misunderstood what they saw and just weren’t listening carefully when Goodwin explained it to them.
I’m all for a presumption of innocence in legal proceeding and similar administrative actions. What’s striking here is that the faculty’s apparent desire to believe in their colleague’s innocence seemed to shut off any inclination to apply scientific standards of evidence. Maybe they didn’t have enough details (like the grant application) in front of them to judge that Goodwin probably had been fabricating data, but neither did they have evidence to support their judgments that the students were unproductive or acting out of personal animus toward Goodwin. In the absence of data, they did not embrace an agnosticism about who to believe. They sided with their colleague.
I want to mention here that the UW-Madison administration really worked hard to support Goodwin’s students during the investigations. Irwin Goldman, a biology professor and dean involved in the informal inquiry, promised the students that they would still get their salaries while Goodwin was investigated, and the university came through, drawing on university funds to support the students when Goodwin’s grants were canceled. Goldman also provided moral support for the students, helping them to feel just a little less isolated. And, when the university’s investigating committee found that the student’s concerns about Goodwin were well grounded, department chair Culbertson made sure each faculty member in the department got the committee’s written report — underlining that the students who had blown the whistle on their colleague were correct to do so.
Indeed, according to the Science article, dean Goldman is taking steps to make sure that institutional support for whistleblowers does not depend on the personal whims of those running the inquiries:

Goldman does plan to craft formal policies for students who might encounter this situation in the future. The policies, he says, would guarantee that the university protects students from retribution and that their funding remains secure. He hopes that codifying such safeguards will offer potential whistleblowers peace of mind.

Such a policy would be useful, but it’s not clear to me that all the “retribution” that student whistleblowers might face could be eliminated by policy. After the finding of the university’s investigating committee that Goodwin had engaged in deliberate falsification in grant applications and that “her mentoring of her graduate students included behaviors that could be considered scientific misconduct,” the faculty members who had sided with Goodwin didn’t apologize to the students they had doubted. They didn’t fall over themselves to welcome these students into their labs and help them get back on track.
Indeed, one gets the sense that some of Goodwin’s former colleagues might have though that the whistleblowers deserved to have their studies derailed.
I can’t help but think that this is a predictable outcome of a system where principal investigators view their lab groups as fiefdoms. The PI has the power to direct the efforts of her students, choose their projects, set their hours, tell them who to work with, decide whether their data is worth keeping or suitably labeled as junk, decide whether, when, and by whom their results are presented, and so forth. Graduate students management is viewed along the same lines as parental discipline: what happens within the laboratory walls in your business. (Actually, people probably talk more about parenting than they do about how they treat their grad students).
In a department organized in this way, the isolation of graduate students from those outside their research group is very effective. They tend not to know much about how things are run in other people’s labs (because if you have time to be forming friendships with people in other labs, or to be keeping up with those friends, that’s cutting into your time in the lab). And, what other faculty members know about graduate students is what they hear from the students’ advisor, who after all is a better authority on whether a student will ever amount to anything as a scientist than the student could ever be.
If you set up a system where the PI controls all the resources the graduate students need — funding, training, even access to other faculty in the department — you also create conditions where the graduate students may feel pressured to go along with all of the PI’s demands. The PI controls your access to the scientific community, and since the PI is recognized as a full member of that community and you are not, the PI can smooth your entry as a full member. Or, by way of their control of what you can publish, their letters of recommendation, and what they confide to their trusted colleagues in the field, they can mess things up for you.
Principal investigators have too much power over the fate of their graduate students.
What if departments decided that it takes a village to raise a scientist? What if no single professor held the power of scientific life or death over a graduate student? If the standard mode of graduate training involved collaboration between faculty members directing and supervising research projects, and regular interactions with other faculty members, it might be easier for students to stay on track if one of those faculty members had to leave in disgrace (or even if she left on good terms). It would also expose the students to different styles of mentoring and lab management, which might well be useful for them when they become PIs. And, it might help the department faculty to regard the graduate students as budding scientists whose strengths and weaknesses they know first hand, rather than simply as their colleague’s serfs.
Another shift that might help in situations like this would be to consider that a series of small, distinct research projects could also constitute an important contribution to a scientific field. If we only count projects that take 5+ years in a lab as Ph.D.-worthy, the chances of getting back on track if a project falls apart in year 4 or 5 are not good. They may be low enough that people close to the end of their time have a significant incentive not to notice or look for flaws in their research, even obvious ones.
The scientific community really needs to be able to trust that those in the community are being honest in their research and in their communications with other scientists. This means scientists have a duty to call out dishonesty when they see it. Whistleblowing shouldn’t be too easy — given the snake pit atmosphere arising from competition for scarce grant money, journal pages, and faculty positions, you wouldn’t want false accusations to be the preferred way to neutralize your competition. But given the real conditions facing whistleblowers — especially those with less power in the community than the bad actors whose conduct they are bringing to light — standing up for scientific integrity looks an awful lot like a martyrdom operation. At the same time, you have to be able to live with yourself and your own choices. Some scientists won’t be able to look at themselves in the mirror if they know that they are enabling conduct that harms the body of scientific knowledge and the scientific community itself.
For the health of the scientific endeavor, blowing the whistle on bad conduct ought not to be a career killer. This means that the scientific community needs to take care of the people standing up for the truth.
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[1] Jennifer Couzin, “Truth and Consequences,” Science, Vol. 313 (1 September 2006), 1222-1226.