As promised, I’ve been thinking about the details of Chandok v. Klessig. To recap, we have a case where a postdoc (Meena Chandok) generated some exciting scientific findings. She and her supervisor (Daniel F. Klessig), along with some coworkers, published those findings. Then, in the fullness of time, after others working with Klessig tried to reproduce those findings on the way to extending the work, Klessig decided that the results were not sufficiently reproducible.
At that point, Klessig decided that the published papers reported those findings needed to be retracted. Retracting a paper, as we’ve had occasion to discuss before, communicates something about the results (namely that the authors cannot stand behind them anymore). By extension, a retraction can also communicate something to the scientific community about the researcher responsible for generating those results — perhaps that she was too quick to decide a result was robust and rush it into print, or that she made an honest mistake that was not discovered until after the paper was published, or that her coauthors no longer trust that her scientific reports are reliable.
The issue is complicated, I think, by the fact that there were coauthors on the papers in question. Coauthors share the labor of doing the scientific work, and they share the credit for the findings described in their paper. You might expect, therefore, that they would share responsibility for quality control on the scientific work, and for making sure that the findings are robust before the manuscript goes off to the journal. (In my first post on this case, I noted that “before the work was submitted to Cell, Klessig had one of his doctoral students try to verify it, and this attempt was at least good enough not to put the brakes on the manuscript submission.” However, given that further efforts to reproduce the findings seem not to have succeeded, I suspect opinions will vary on whether this pre-submission replication was enough quality control on the authors’ parts.) And, you might expect that it would be the rare case where a problem with a published manuscript would come to rest on the shoulders of a single author in the group.
If credit is shared, why isn’t blame?
Whatever you think ought to be the standard assumptions when a collaborative piece of scientific work does not hold up, in this particular case the blame seemed to fall on Chandok. She took issue with the implication of the retractions (among other communications) that she was unreliable as a scientific researcher. Probably she considered the importance of trust and accountability in the scientific community, recognizing that if she were not trusted by her fellow scientists and if her work were viewed as presumptively unreliable, she would not have much of a scientific career ahead of her. So, she sought legal remedy for this harm to her scientific reputation and career prospects by pursuing a defamation claim against Klessig.
There are separable issues at play here. One is the question of what is required in the eyes of the law to prove a claim of defamation. Another is what would constitute “best practices” for scientific work, both in terms of dealing with data and conclusions, and in terms of dealing with the scientists who generate the data and conclusions (and who are the main audience for the findings reported by other scientists). Here, I think “dealing with” encompasses more than simply classifying fellow scientists by whether or not you can trust their scientific output. It includes interactions with collaborators (and competitors) , not to mention interactions in scientific training relationships.
We might quibble about where a postdoc falls in the process of scientific training and development. Nevertheless, if the PI supervising a postdoc is supposed to be teaching her something (rather than just using her as another pair of hands, however well trained, in the lab), he may have specific responsibilities to mentor her and help her get established as a PI herself. Sorting out what those responsibilities are — and what other responsibilities could trump them — might be useful in preventing this kind of acrimonious outcome in other cases.
We’ll return to considering the broader lessons we might draw from this situation, but first let’s continue laying out the facts of Chandok v. Klessig, 5:05-cv-01076. (Again, I’m indebted to the reader who helpfully sent me the PDF of District Judge Joseph M. Hood’s ruling in this case, which is what I’m quoting below.)

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