NBC Boston: "Explosive, radioactive substances at late chemist's home bring bomb squad to Lexington"

Via Google News, this story from July 22: 

A highly explosive chemical, radioactive substances and more hazardous materials found at a late chemist's house in Lexington brought out the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad for a complex removal Monday, officials said.

A hazmat team and an FBI bomb technician were also part of the response prompted by a clean-out of a home on Longfellow Road, state and local fire officials said Tuesday. Lexington fire officials called in the help after finding dozens of bottles of powders, liquids and solids, including the highly explosive chemical picric acid and fire hazards.

Police and firefighters secured the area around the home while hazmat and bomb technicians entered and carefully searched it, organizing the materials and removing them to a truck filled with sand over about seven hours. Officials said that an ambulance and firefighters with a charged hose were on standby, just in case.

It's not like local ACS sections don't already have plenty of things to do and not enough resources, but volunteering to help fire departments with household chemical troves might be a good one. 

*maybe the right idea is a "chemical will", i.e. you write out an inventory for the authorities? 

Arkansas chemistry professors arrested and charged for methamphetamine manufacture

Via Bethany Halford at C&EN, this unusual story of academic chemical manufacturing (emphasis mine):  

Terry David Bateman and Bradley Allen Rowland, the two former Henderson State University chemistry professors who were arrested in November for allegedly making methamphetamine, pleaded not guilty to all charges on Feb. 4. The chemists are formally charged with making methamphetamine, possession of paraphernalia for making methamphetamine, possession of the methamphetamine precursor phenylpropanolamine, and manufacture of a controlled substance in a drug-free zone (the university). 

According to an affidavit filed by Sheriff Jason Watson, in Dec. 2018 HSU faculty reported that Bateman and Rowland were behaving in a suspicious manner that led the faculty to believe the two were involved in illegal activity in one of the chemistry laboratories. The HSU staff told a university lawyer that Bateman and Rowland had “exhibited drastic changes in their personal hygiene and weight loss.” Both professors were seen in the laboratory late at night and early in the morning and “were extremely guarded towards other faculty and students who came into the laboratory.” 

...The next month police officers visited one of the school’s laboratories and discovered an overwhelming odor they recognized as phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), a precursor used in the synthesis of amphetamine and methamphetamine... 

...In November, officers executed a search-and-seizure warrant on Bateman and Rowland’s offices at HSU. The officers forced open a locked metal safe in Bateman’s office. It smelled strongly of P2P and contained 190 glass vials with visible chemical residue. Preliminary field tests of two vials and a flask from another HSU laboratory indicated the presence of methamphetamine, according to the affidavit.

I'd sure like to understand what these professors were thinking... (What does phenyl-2-propanone smell like?)

White House official speaks on the Lieber case

From Asia-oriented media outlet "The Diplomat", coverage of the Lieber case, with this comment from the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:

...Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, director of OSTP, in his statement on the case said that “failures to disclose the receipt of substantial resources, participation in certain types of programs, and dual employment distort decisions about the appropriate use of taxpayer funds.” 

The result is “hidden transfers of information, know-how and time.” 

He went on to say that “this is exactly why OSTP launched the Joint Committee on the Research Environment,” known as JCORE. Droegemeier emphasized that JCORE has a “coordinated approach that includes the research community as a whole.” That means working with the full spectrum of federal agencies, along with the private, academic, professional society, and nonprofit research worlds. 

It’s important to continue “successful international collaborations,” Droegemeier said, but “protecting the integrity of our research system” has to be done at the same time. 

“The challenges posed by foreign-government sponsored talent recruitment programs” are met by “behavior-based” approaches, he explained, echoing comments made by Assistant Attorney General John Demers at a Homeland Security Experts Group event held at the Wilson Center earlier this month.

I don't think we've seen evidence of "hidden transfers of information", but I guess this will come out at some point. I suspect there are a lot of university professors who are looking very carefully at their grant application boilerplate and filing changes...

==

This was an interesting profile of Professor Lieber in the Wall Street Journal. Lots of quotes from former students, including this one:

Mr. Timko recalled Mr. Lieber as being in his lab office six days a week, often from 8 a.m. to midnight, driving a nondescript car, dressing down and reading scientific literature for pleasure. 

His hobbies included growing pumpkins in his backyard, one of which weighed 1,870 pounds, the largest in the state in 2014.

So my thought process around Professor Lieber's motivations is that he was financially motivated by the Thousand Talent program's large payouts ($50,000/month (pro-rated?) and $158,000 of living expenses). But if he doesn't have an extravagant lifestyle, where did the money go? 

BREAKING: Charles Lieber released on bail for $1 million

From C&EN's Bethany Halford and Andrea Widener:

Lieber appeared at a Jan. 30, 2020, hearing shackled and wearing an orange jumpsuit. His bail was set at $1 million cash. He also had to agree to surrender his and his wife’s passports, to disclose foreign bank accounts, and to have no contact with Wuhan University of Technology, Peking University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Here are Beth's two tweets from the courthouse. Did anyone have the "Harvard CCB chair in jumpsuit" spot on their 2020 bingo card?  

BREAKING: Harvard chemistry chair charged with lying to US government re: Chinese academic funding

Via Twitter, this remarkable news from the New York Times: 

BOSTON — Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, was charged on Tuesday with making false statements about money he had received from a Chinese government-run program, part of a broad-ranging F.B.I. effort to root out scientists suspected of stealing biomedical research from American laboratories. 

Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, was one of three Boston-area scientists accused on Tuesday of working on behalf of China. His case involves work with the Thousand Talents Program, a state-run program that seeks to draw talent educated in other countries... 

...Federal prosecutors said on Tuesday that Dr. Lieber made false representation to questions about his participation in the Chinese program to the United States Department of Defense. He is also charged with misrepresenting his involvement in Thousand Talents and his affiliation with Wuhan University of Technology to officials at the National Institutes of Health. 

According to charging documents, Dr. Lieber was paid up to $50,000 per month in salary and $150,000 per year in living expenses by Wuhan University of Technology. He was also awarded more than $1.5 million by the university and the Chinese government to build a laboratory in Wuhan. 

Researchers are legally obligated to disclose such payments  to their academic institutions. 

A representative for Dr. Lieber could not immediately be reached for comment....

NBC indicates this is the shakeout from a Boston-wide investigation, including a PLA lieutenant who was studying at Boston University. Here are details from NYT on that:

...Yanqing Ye, a physicist who had been studying at Boston University until last spring, was also charged on Tuesday, accused of lying to authorities about her status as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army. Ms. Ye, who was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy, is in China and was not be arrested...

This is moving a bit fast for me to understand what is happening, but here are my priors:

• I do believe it is clear that there is a Chinese government-wide priority to use whatever means available to obtain economically- and militarily-important scientific and engineering IP from the US. 
• I am very skeptical as to the FBI's ability to distinguish between scientists who were stupid (i.e. broke laws accidentally) and those who were evil (those who intended to break laws and transfer science/technology illegally.) 
• I believed this before the current Administration, I note
• I suspect that this effort on the part of the FBI will be broadly unproductive for everyone involved. 

So, those are my priors. We'll see how this goes. Updates as news becomes available. Looks like Harvard is cutting ties quick - their statement, via NBC: 

"The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious," Harvard said in a statement. "Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the alleged misconduct." 

The university added that Lieber has been put on "indefinite administrative leave."

 Bonkers.

UPDATE 1:48 PM: The Justice Department press release, and the actual indictment. After reading the indictment, it sure seems like the FBI has Professor Lieber dead to rights on lying to the FBI agents who visited him.

CJ's advice: Don't talk to the cops. If you must talk to the cops, don't lie. (Also, don't talk to the cops without a lawyer. But better yet, don't talk to the cops.)

The weirdest article you will read today

From a friend of the blog, this odd Daily Beast piece with a chemist who worked for ISIS: 

“ISIS was looking for scientists,” said Ahmed, a 36-year-old follower of the so-called Islamic State who holds a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry and drug design. And Ahmed was looking for a chance to put his scientific knowledge to use.... 

...While Ahmed started his work for ISIS by spreading this research and interacting on web forums on behalf of the group in 2015 and 2016, he fully intended to join the lab in Mosul upon his graduation and was confident of his ability to create the desired chemical and biological weapons. At the time, he believed ISIS was already an established state and would continue to expand. 

“I would upload and [my research] would get read by the high command of the Caliphate,” he told us. “They were interested in my posts and asked how we can acquire these chemicals. I also summarized books from a Russian website. There are loads of [scientific] journals I could access on the web and it’s not classified.  I told them everything was in my summary, but also told them, you must have a real lab.” 

...He hoped to branch out from poisons and plagues to explore new technologies for delivering them. “I learned in the engineering world they [ISIS] were interested in anti-aircraft missiles and drones. They complain about coalition jet fighters destroying their troops on the ground. The admin on the website, there was a guy on the website who provided links from a British university to make drones from organic synthesis to make the whole body of the drone. It was some kind of solution, liquid phase synthesis, polymer science. We have already developed anti-aircraft missiles. We were going to use them.”

This is just a weird one, and I'm not convinced (or at least I'd like other corroboration) that ISIS got as involved in chemical weapons research as this fellow (who seems not so reliable) says....

The newest chapter in the UT-Austin case

Via Chemical and Engineering News, an article from Bethany Halford on the Suvi Orr/Stephen Martin retraction/thesis revocation case: 

The University of Texas at Austin does not have the authority to revoke a student’s degree, according to a Feb. 11 ruling by Judge Karin Crump in Travis County, Texas district court. The judgment is the latest turn in the university’s years-long effort to strip Suvi Orr of her doctorate in chemistry. 

Orr began her graduate studies in organic synthesis in Stephen Martin’s lab in 2003. In 2008 she successfully defended her thesis. But six years later, UT Austin sent a certified letter to Orr saying the school was invalidating her thesis based on research misconduct. The university cited a 2011 Organic Letters paper that was retracted in 2012 (DOI: 10.1021/ol302236g) because two steps in the synthesis could not be reproduced 

Orr, now a senior principal scientist at Pfizer, denies any wrongdoing. “The allegations were all related to the 2011 Organic Letters paper,” she says. “It was drafted and put together by Professor Martin and a postdoc who was at UT at the time. I did not write it.” Her attorneys, Anita Kawaja and David Sergi, say UT Austin’s claim of misconduct revolves around three nuclear magnetic resonance spectra. 

“She discussed all this data with Professor Martin, and he reviewed it with her,” Kawaja says. With his input as her mentor, she reported it in her dissertation. “The three datapoints at issue are entirely irrelevant to Dr. Orr’s dissertation,” Kawaja adds. “She could have taken that data out of her dissertation and it wouldn’t have affected the conclusion. She still would have been qualified to receive her degree.” It wasn’t until 2011 that Martin approached Orr about publishing the work. Kawaja said Orr agreed to do so only because Martin reassured her that the data had been reproduced. 

Martin declined to comment.

I haven't followed this case closely enough to intelligently comment on it. I suppose all I can say is that it seems pretty unusual for a professor to press forward with revocation of a Ph.D. thesis - can anyone else point to another instance where this was the course of action decided upon? 

Harvard, Matt Shair being sued by former postdoc

For soon, but for now, a few sentences from the report from Chemical and Engineering News (article by Marc S. Reisch):

A former Harvard University postdoctoral researcher has sued the university for his share of $20 million that Merck & Co. paid Harvard in 2016 to license preclinical compounds to treat leukemia. At the time, the license fee was called the largest ever for a technology developed at Harvard. 

The researcher, Alexander Arefolov, worked in the lab of Harvard chemist Matthew Shair between 2011 and 2015. He claims that he was intentionally left off a patent covering the compounds, which are derivatives of cortistatin A. 

The patent, which Harvard applied for in 2016, names five scientists, including Shair, as inventors. It details steps to synthesize derivatives of cortistatin A, a complex, difficult-to-isolate natural product from sea sponges...

NB the lawsuit is being filed by the same lawyer that filed suit (and reached a settlement) in the Charest case.

UPDATE 1: According to the Boston Globe:

Arefolov is seeking about $1 million, plus a pro-rated share of future royalties that could be paid by Merck if a drug based on the Harvard technology is approved, according to his attorney, Brian D. O’Reilly.

UPDATE 2: I contacted Dr. Arefolov's lawyer (Brian O'Reilly) and he provided the lawsuit and related documents. (Google Drive link) Things that I found interesting:

Here are the basic facts, as laid out by Dr. Arefolov:

29. Between 2006 and 2011, Dr. Arefolov and Dr. Shair worked together at Makoto Life Sciences, a biotechnology startup. Dr. Arefolov was a research scientist and Dr. Shair was a Scientific Advisory Board member at the company. During that time, Dr. Arefolov and Dr. Shair worked closely together.
30. In July 2011, Professor Shair invited Dr. Arefolov to accept a visiting scientist position at Harvard.
31. Over the next three months, Dr. Arefolov worked on the Cortistatin A Project. During that time, he made an important breakthrough that had beguiled previous lab members.
32. Seeing Dr. Arefolov’s contribution to the Cortistatin A Project, in October 2011, Dr. Shair offered Dr. Arefolov a position as a post-doctorial scientist to continue his work on the project.
33. Dr. Arefolov accepted the position and continued to work on the project until April 2015.

34. The pay for post-doctorial scientist was substantially less than many industry positions. Part of the allure of taking a position as a post-doctorial scientist in Dr. Shair’s laboratory was the hope that he would receive patent royalties from his work.
35. Dr. Shair repeatedly assured Dr. Arefolov that his work on the Cortistatin A Project was valuable and that he would ensure that Harvard would recognize Dr. Arefolov’s contributions if they were successful in securing a patent and any patent royalties.
39. During the four years Dr. Arefolov worked in Dr. Shair’s lab he worked long hours and dedicated his work exclusively to the Cortistatin A Project. Central to the Cortistatin A Project was the effort to investigate, create, and test new Cortistatin A analogs. Dr. Arefolov’s worked extensively on the investigation and creation of Cortistatin analogs.

 And the important bits about money:

62. In multiple conversations with Dr. Shair, Dr. Arefolov inquired about possible patent royalties he could receive from his work on the Cortistatin A Project. Dr. Shair reassured Dr. Arefolov that Harvard would recognize his work. Dr. Shair understood that it was unlikely Dr. Arefolov would agree to a reduced share of the royalties in order to increase Dr. Shair’s share of the royalties.
63. In fact, it was that very reliance on future royalties that Dr. Shair used to convince Dr. Arefolov to stay on as post-doctorial scientist. On multiple occasions, Dr. Shair made statements such as “Alex, the inventors at Harvard University receive 35% of any license fee, if the project is successful – you will receive your fair share.”

I think we should take a moment here and note this story is told from the point of view of the plaintiff, and so Harvard and Professor Shair are going to have a different story.

That said, it's clear to me that Dr. Arefolov was convinced to leave his previous position at a small company in order to work with Professor Shair on the cortistatin project. If you go through the complaint, it sounds like Dr. Arefolov is hanging his hat on that he should have been a co-inventor because he suggested the making of analogs that made it into one of the patent applications. Assuming (a big assumption) that Dr. Arefolov was a co-inventor, it seems very reasonable for him to want relief for being left off the patent and for the 4 years he was convinced to work as a postdoc.

The thing that the documents do not answer is this: why is Dr. Arefolov no longer working for Professor Shair? Who are the other inventors that were put on the relevant patents and patent applications? What share did they get? (UPDATE 3: see below) 

It will be interesting to see what happens next, especially since Dr. Arefolov (and, I presume, Mr. O'Reilly) are also claiming that Professor Shair should have been acting in his role as a fiduciary for Dr. Arefolov. As long time readers of the blog may know, Mark Charest (and Mr. O'Reilly) did not succeed in this claim against Professor Andy Myers of Harvard. 

I look forward to hearing the facts behind this case; until then, students who have made big, commercialize-able discoveries in the laboratory, might want to find out what your university's IP policy is...

UPDATE 3: Professor Shair received an equal share with his co-inventors, after Harvard took their percentage. 

A peculiar case of remarkable similarities

Tables 4 and 5 from Mandapati et al. and Seelam et al.

Via Twitter, Lana Hiscock found some very interesting similaries between two Tetrahedron Letters papers. She also wrote it up on Reddit: 

"Recently I discovered two almost identical, and in places copied and pasted, articles on synthetic methodology (both published within the last 6 months). Amazingly, neither journal has any link on their website which I could find for reporting apparent plagiarism. Not only that, but I caught the outright copying easily and it's something that should have been picked up in peer review.... 

...Additionally, and highly suspiciously, they all refer to water as a "grenary" (or "greenary" in one case) solvent. If you Google "grenary solvent" you get the ChemistrySelect paper as the fourth result. If you can read the articles, it's obvious, in my opinion, that these papers are all related to a common ancestor."

In her Reddit post, she points to four separate papers (a 2016 Tet. Lett., a 2017 Tet. Lett., a Synth. Commun. paper and a ChemistrySelect.). This Reddit comment from Auntie Markovnikov indicates there may be both plagiarism and self-plagiarism going on.

I haven't been able to check all four papers, but I have downloaded both Tetrahedron Letters papers and as you can see above, there are remarkable similarities in the methods table.

Amusingly, if you search a phrase in both of the Tetrahedron Letters papers ("The reactions are rapid and facile and accomplished at room temperature"), you find yet another paper, this one from 2011 and published in Green Chemistry Letters and Reviews. The subject matter is rather similar; one wonders if this is the original source.

As more and more of the literature becomes open-access, isn't there some way to program bots to crawl the literature and look for plagiarized text? Might be a useful thing... 

Federal judge: In the state of Massachusetts, a student and a PI do not have a fiduciary relationship

Elizabeth Wilson's article in C&EN is a great update in the state of play in the lawsuit between Dr. Mark Charest, Professor Andy Myers of Harvard University and Harvard itself. The back story is that Dr. Charest was (at the time) a graduate student for Professor Myers and developed a new route to tetracycline antibiotics; his work was ultimately was patented, published (he was the first author of 5) and then commercialized via a company, Tetraphase. 

When the Harvard technology transfer department announced that Professor Meyers would be paid a 50% share of the royalties and that Dr. Charest would receive an 18.75% share, Dr. Charest objected. He was seemingly threatened by his research advisor who told him to "be careful" and ultimately refused to act as a reference when Dr. Charest later applied to a venture capital firm.* He ultimately filed a lawsuit, which has continued to grind on until last month, when the judge in the case issued a ruling dismissing Professor Myers from the case, dismissing many of the charges, but allowing the lawsuit between Harvard's technology transfer office and Dr. Charest to proceed on the basis of Dr. Charest's argument that he was not treated fairly by Harvard.

One of the interesting aspects of Dr. Charest's lawsuit was his claim that Professor Myers needed to be acting as a "fiduciary", which is a technical term meaning (according to Wikipedia):

A fiduciary is a person who holds a legal or ethical relationship of trust with one or more other parties (person or group of persons). Typically, a fiduciary prudently takes care of money or other asset for another person.

Back when this case came out, we had a bit of a discussion about this on the blog, and I expressed my surprise that there could be a legal basis for a fiduciary relationship between a PI and a student, but I acknowledged that past legal rulings were somewhat murky.

Well, the federal judge (the Honorable Douglas Woodlock) has spoken (PDF), and he rejects Dr. Charest's argument that the there is a fiduciary relationship between a PI and a student. From Judge Woodlock's ruling:

...Dr. Charest claims that Dr. Myers assumed the role of a fiduciary by virtue of his role as Dr. Charest’s supervisor and academic advisor, and as head of Dr. Charest’s laboratory, (Am. Compl. 166-69,) and that Dr. Myers breached his fiduciary obligations by using his position to obtain a more favorable share of the royalties from the tetracycline research at Dr. Charest’s expense. (Am. Compl. 262.)  

Dr. Charest’s attempt to allege a fiduciary relationship fails for two reasons. First, I conclude that under Massachusetts law, a student-advisor relationship is not fiduciary in nature. (emphasis CJ's) Justice Fremont-Smith of the Massachusetts Superior Court addressed precisely this issue in Battenfield v. Harvard Univ., No. 915089F, 1 Mass. L. Rptr. 75 (Mass. Sup. Ct. Aug. 31, 1993), and held that the relationship of an academic advisor to a student does not constitute a fiduciary relationship, xplaining that “[o]ne party cannot unilaterally transform a business or academic relationship into a fiduciary relationship by reposing trust and confidence in another.” Id. at *9. (Citing Comstock v. Livingston, 97 N.E. 106, 108 (Mass. 1912)). [footnote follows]

Judge Woodlock's footnote: Dr. Charest contends that the relationship at issue in Battenfield v. Harvard Univ., 1 Mass. L. Rptr. 75 (Mass. Sup. Ct. Aug. 31, 1993) was an employee-employer relationship, making that case inapplicable. It is clear that, as to at least one defendant in Battenfield, Sue Weaver Schopf, the relationship was purely that of an academic advisor, which the court determined was not fiduciary in nature. Id. at *9. 

Dr. Charest also relies upon Chou, 254 F.3d 1347, for the proposition that a student-advisor relationship is fiduciary in nature. In addition to being decided under Illinois law, there were specific facts existing in Chou that are absent in the present case. These include the fact that Chou’s advisor “specifically represented to her that he would protect and give her proper credit for her research and inventions” and had “responsibility to make patenting decisions regarding Chou's inventions.” Chou, 254 F.3d at 1362.  

There is no allegation that Dr. Myers made any such promises or assumed such responsibilities with respect to Dr. Charest. (emphasis CJ's)

Well, just in case you thought your adviser had your best financial interests in mind (if you were in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts), the answer is "not on a legal basis, no." 

The UT case

I have been remiss in not covering the UT-Austin kerfluffle resulting from a Organic Letters retraction that resulted in UT-Austin's attempted revocation of a Ph.D. Here's a small portion of the Austin American-Statesman article about it: 

A woman who graduated from the University of Texas with a Ph.D. in chemistry has filed suit for the second time in an effort to keep the university from revoking her degree. 

Suvi Orr, who received her doctorate in 2008, first sued UT in February 2014 after school administrators informed her that “scientific misconduct occurred in the production of your dissertation,” including “falsified and misreported data.” 

Now a plaintiff identified as “S.O.” has sued UT in state District Court in Travis County. Although the lawsuit refers to the plaintiff by those initials for privacy protections under federal law, the circumstances of the case leave no doubt that she is Orr. 

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, said UT officials revoked her degree but promptly reinstated it for “a do-over” during the first round of litigation. The suit contends that UT now plans to subject her to a “kangaroo court” whose members include undergraduate students lacking the expertise to interpret scientific data stemming from her research involving synthesis of chemicals.

There's a lot of discussion in the comments, both at Retraction Watch (who has been covering this case for a while) and at In the Pipeline.

It is certainly surprising that UT went to the trouble of revoking a doctorate; I would presume such extraordinary action must have some extraordinary evidence behind it, but beats me, I guess.

What is also surprising to me is the apparent willingness of both of these parties to involve their respective lawyers. I guess that it makes sense from Dr. Orr's perspective - it is the foundation of her career. But why is UT fighting this so hard? Why attempt revocation for a second time? 

More pictures that look funny

Via the Chemistry Reddit and the illustrious @fxcoudert. 

Is a professor in a fiduciary relationship with a graduate student or postdoc?

In case you haven't heard, Paul at ChemBark has recently broken the story of Harvard chemistry professor Andrew Myers being sued for a lot of money by one of his former graduate students, Dr. Mark Charest -- upwards of tens of millions of dollars, it looks like.

Very long story, shortened: Charest and coworkers were grad students and postdocs of Andrew Myers. Collaboratively, they developed a new route to tetracycline antibiotics; this route was patented and published by Myers and coworkers and Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals was born from their work. When it came time to split royalties from the patent, Professor Myers announced (via the Harvard patent folks) that he was taking 50% of the royalties and the other students/postdocs would be free to split it as they saw fit. Mark Charest was unhappy with this arrangement, but was ultimately forced to agree to taking 18.75% of the royalties. He filed a lawsuit on this last Friday in federal court. (Lots more details are in the complaint.)

You can read Paul's comments here, the short Web article here and the complaint from Dr. Charest's lawyers here. I would also like to associate myself with Paul's comments about the vulnerability of graduate students by quoting it approvingly:

It will be interesting to see how this story plays out, but it would seem to be yet another cautionary tale that when you are a graduate student, you are in a position of incredible weakness. As is said, your advisor holds your paycheck in one hand and your letter of recommendation in the other. And in case you are naive, the chains don’t get unshackled just because you’ve graduated. You’re still going to need that letter of recommendation for future jobs, so if your old boss wants to take 50% of the royalties, what’s to stop him? 

Nothing.

I wish I could find something to argue with in there, but I can't. (Well, okay, I think that 5 years after you leave your PI, their words begin to lose a fair bit of weight, and they should begin dropping off your CV as a reference. (I mean, seriously, how much do they know about your current job performance?) Problem is, of course, is that the more prominent the professor, the more likely it is that they'll stay on your CV.) 

What I found interesting is one of the final statements by Dr. Charest's lawyers on page 35 of the document:

259. Dr. Myers was Dr. Charest’s PhD advisor.
260. Dr. Myers advised Dr. Charest and headed the lab in which he worked on the research that led to the Pioneering Tetracycline Patents.
261. Dr. Myers had a fiduciary duty to Dr. Charest.
262. Dr. Myers breached his fiduciary duty to Dr. Charest by using his position as a fiduciary to secure more royalties for himself to the detriment of Dr. Charest.

I was surprised to learn that, in the view of Dr. Charest's lawyers, his PI had a fiduciary duty to his student. That term is supposed to invoke quite a trusting relationship -- here's Wikipedia: 

Typically, a fiduciary prudently takes care of money for another person. One party, for example a corporate trust company or the trust department of a bank, acts in a fiduciary capacity to the other one, who for example has funds entrusted to it for investment. In a fiduciary relationship, one person, in a position of vulnerability, justifiably vests confidence, good faith, reliance and trust in another whose aid, advice or protection is sought in some matter. In such a relation good conscience requires the fiduciary to act at all times for the sole benefit and interest of the one who trusts.

It's easy for me to think of my (deep, loving, Boglehead-esque) relationship with the mutual fund company Vanguard as a fiduciary one. It's rather difficult for me to think of a professor as being in a fiduciary relationship with a student. However, a conversation with @NCharles on Twitter reveals two law articles which argue that the picture is murky, but in cases where intellectual property is in play, professors seem to be in a fiduciary role with their students and have found to be in breach of their fiduciary duties. From the 2nd link above, an interesting comment about a case of a biology grad student (Chou) and her adviser (Roizman) and some patents that the adviser filed for, without including her on them (emphases mine):

...From 1983 to 1996, Chou was a doctoral student and subsequently a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Chicago’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology. Roizman acted as chairman of this department and as Chou’s advisor. [snip] 

This dispute commenced in February of 1991, when Chou allegedly suggested to Roizman that her discoveries should be patented and he opposed the idea. At the time the discussion occurred, however, Roizman had already filed a patent application for the inventions, listing himself as the sole inventor. In 1996, Roizman asked Chou to resign, and told her if she did not resign, he would fire her.

...The appellate court upheld Chou’s claim against Roizman for breach of fiduciary duty, recognizing that “a fiduciary relationship may . . . arise from the special circumstances of the parties’ relationship, such as when one party justifiably places trust in another so that the latter gains superiority and influence over the former.” The rapport between Chou and Roizman suggests a fiduciary relationship between the two parties. For thirteen years, Roizman was Chou’s supervisor in the laboratory as well as her educational advisor. A long-term supervisory relationship such as this, especially during the initial development of a student’s career, should indicate a fiduciary duty on the part of the supervising professor. Further, the court specifically found certain factors present in the relationship indicating Roizman’s fiduciary duty to Chou. Specifically, the court determined that there was a disparity in the two parties’ experience and roles and that Roizman had the power to make decisions regarding the patenting of Chou’s inventions. 

Well, that was a bit of information that I was not aware of while in graduate school! I believed (and still do) that my adviser had, within reason, my best interests in mind. I did not extend that to the fair division of a crapton of money, which is the realm of the relevant Charest/Myers case (Tetraphase's initial funding was for $25 million.) Money unleashes people's greed -- and it always has. In this sense, this case is sad, but not surprising.

While I would really be interested to see documents from the discovery phase, or how a trial court or a trial jury might react to the very imbalanced relationship between adviser and student, I don't really expect anything to come out of this case, other than a quiet settlement. Readers, what do you think? 

David Snyder arraigned

The latest on Dr. David Snyder, the UC Davis postdoc who was apparently experimenting with explosives in his campus apartment from Jyllian Kemsley at The Safety Zone:

UC Davis chemist David Snyder was arraigned this afternoon on three counts of reckless disposal of hazardous waste, three counts of possession of a destructive device or explosive, one count of possession of materials with intent to make a destructive device, and two counts of possessing or bringing a firearm onto campus. All ten counts are felonies.

Dr. Kemsley notes the AP's report, where they talk to Dr. Snyder's attorney:

Snyder's defense attorney, Linda Parisi, said her client had the materials for research. "What happened in Dr. Snyder's apartment was an accident. He harbored no intent to build or detonate an explosive device," she said. "He is a chemist working on a variety of projects."

I would really like to know a couple of things:

• What were the destructive devices that the Yolo County DA are charging Dr. Snyder with possessing? (I am fully prepared for them to be potentially underwhelming.) 
• What is "the variety of projects" that Dr. Snyder was working on, and why couldn't he have done them in his laboratory? 

This case confuses me; I await more data. 

What was David Snyder doing?

Jyllian Kemsley is covering this interesting case on the UC Davis campus:

That “‘small chemical explosion’ in a UC Davis student housing complex” wasn’t meth. The university researcher who set off the explosion, 32-year-old Ph.D. chemist David Snyder, was arrested over the weekend on explosives and firearms possession charges.

Literature searches indicate that Dr. Snyder is a synthetic chemist, with a patent and a J. Med. Chem. paper to his name (and also a regional ACS conference poster.) He's apparently a postdoc, if you look at California state employee records.

I don't know what he was up to, and I don't care to speculate very much, other than to say this: if one were going to be experimenting on explosive compounds, it would seem wise to do it in a laboratory, where requisite safety equipment is. (Throwing aside, of course, that you would be risking your labmates' life as well as your own.) As I said on Twitter, most people in the lab don't really pay attention to what other people are up to in their hoods (even when they should be.)

I guess I'll be following this story, too. 

A contribution to the Pierre-Yan debacle

Shawn Burdette of WPI tweeted an interesting set of coincidences between two papers, a JACS from Pierre of the University of Minnesota in 2009 and an interesting counterpart in Chemistry: A European Journal from Yan of Beijing Normal University in 2013. Apparently, Professor Pierre is very unhappy with the similarities between the two articles. See Arr Oh has nailed down the similarities in the texts quite well; I have little to add. Go over there and read.

I can add the now-required Cantrilling of the text. To left, Thibon, A.; Pierre, V.C. JACS, 2009, 131, 434. and to the right, Yan, X.; Lv, S.; Guo, R. Chem. Eur. J. 2013, 19, 465.

Orange text indicates text that is the same words. 

Suffice it to say that there is A LOT of similarity in the text in these two papers, especially in the introduction and the conclusion sections. The chemistry and figures are also remarkably similar. 

What I found most bothersome is that even the supporting information seemed similar. While most SI language is pretty boilerplate, I found it remarkable that the odd spacing of "over night" (e.g. "further dried under high vacuum over night at room temperature.") was in the JACS SI on only the 3rd and 4th intermediate, and lo and behold! That same wording is only in the 3rd and 4th intermediates of the Chem. Eur. J. SI. 

I am a big fan of alternate hypotheses, so I'm game for an explanation from commenters, or better yet, the authors. (One should note that Blogspot is not available in the PRC, so that might pose a problem for both SAO and myself.) 

I think it's long past time for all journals to subscribe to some sort of plagiarism software, like TurnItIn. If college students can't do it, neither should chemistry professors.