Bad actor PI + young grad students = non va bene

I really haven't covered the Ranga Dias superconductivity story, but Nature's news section has really got the goods on it (article by Dan Garisto): 

...But the measurements were plagued by systematic errors, which students say they shared with Dias. “I was very, very concerned that one of the probes touching the sample was broken,” one student says. “We could be measuring something that looks like a superconducting drop, but be fooling ourselves.” Although students did see resistance drops in a few other samples, there was no consistency across samples, or even for repeated measurements of a single sample, they told Nature’s news team.

Students were also worried about the accuracy of other measurements. During elemental analysis of a sample, they detected trace amounts of nitrogen. Dias concluded that the samples included the element — and the resulting paper refers to nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. But further analysis, performed after the paper was submitted, indicated that nitrogen was not incorporated into the LuH. “Ranga ignored what I was saying,” one student says.

Because they were not consulted on the CSH paper, the students say they wanted to make sure they were included in the process of writing the LuH paper. According to the students, Dias initially agreed to involve them. “Then, one day, he sends us an e-mail and says, ‘Here’s the paper. I’m gonna submit it,’” one student says.

E-mails seen by Nature’s news team corroborate the timeline. Dias sent out the first draft of the LuH paper in an e-mail at 2.09 a.m. on 25 April 2022. “Please send me your comments by 10.30 AM,” Dias wrote. “I am submitting it today.” The manuscript they received did not contain any figures, making it difficult to assess. The students convinced Dias to hold off on submitting until the next day, when they could discuss it in person.

One student was upset enough by the meeting that they wrote a memorandum of the events four days afterwards. The memo gives details of how students raised concerns and Dias dismissed them. Students worried that the draft was misleading, because it included a description of how to synthesize LuH; in reality, all the measurements were taken on commercially bought samples of LuH. “Ranga responded by pointing out that it was never explicitly mentioned that we synthesized the sample so technically he was not lying,” the student wrote.

The students say they also raised concerns about the pressure data reported in the draft. “None of those pressure points correspond to anything that we actually measured,” one student says. According to the memo, Dias dismissed their concerns by saying: “Pressure is a joke.”

Students say that Dias gave them an ultimatum: remove their names, or let him send the draft. Despite their worries, the students say they had no choice but to acquiesce. “I just remember being very intimidated,” one student says. The student says they regret not speaking up more to Dias. “But it’s scary at the time. What if I do and he makes the rest of my life miserable?”

Dias made some changes that the students requested, but ignored others; the submitted manuscript contained a description of a synthesis procedure that had not been used. He sent the LuH manuscript to Nature that evening.

This is an unusually thorough article about a situation where it is pretty clear the PI is a bad actor, intent on lying to the scientific community.* I cannot imagine graduate students (all probably younger than 25) being forced into this situation, especially since they don't know that a PI making claims on a paper that cannot be backed up by data is WEIRD and a solid sign that they should leave their adviser immediately. 

Derek Lowe wisely pointed out the difficulty in leaving a graduate adviser. He likened it to leaving a wedding at the altar. I am not quite sure that is quite the right analogy, but I gotta say, it's in the ballpark (i.e. joining a graduate research group is more like joining a small family than it is like joining a workplace, leaving a graduate adviser is more like openly leaving a team because of a coach more than it is like quitting your job at McDonald's because of a bad shift supervisor.) 

It makes me wonder if incoming graduate students need a small booklet that tells students that they have rights, and that going to the department chair because a new assistant professor is intimidating them over data integrity concerns is an okay thing to do. Until that day, this real but rare thing will just keep happening. 

*what is weirder is that if you're going to publish this in Nature, gee, it's going to attract some attention. So what's the ROI on lying?