印度博后无耻:暗中破坏组员实验半年终于被捕(图)
【北美在线
NAOL.CA】 2010/11/24
分类:教育
北美在线(NAOL.CA):Vipul
Bhrigu,Toledo大学的博士,到Univ of Michigan
Comprehensive Cancer
Center做博后。从09年12月开始“细致而系统”的暗中破坏同组博士女生Heather
Ames的样品。
女博士渐渐发现了问题,开始还以为是自己犯了错误,采取了一些措施防止出错,甚至拿到未婚夫的实验室去做,总是有各种各样的问题。怀疑有人破坏,说给朋友,导师,学校相关部门听,都劝她是不是自己多虑了,甚至认为是她自己工作不顺利,试图归结于其他原因。
直到出现media上被洒酒精,并且接二连三的发生,终于正式由警方介入。女博士被审问两次,测谎一次,才给实验室安装了两个摄像头,并且非常震惊(对于他们,对于我肯定是理所当然)的发现实验室新来的,“和蔼可亲,友好,健谈”的印度博后Vipul
Bhrigu从冰柜中取出自己的样品,然后拿起擦桌子消毒用的酒精spray往里面一阵乱喷。
庭审判了8.8K的罚款和6个月probation,40小时社区服务,给实验室设备、研究进度、人员工资造成的损失要开听证会确定,初步数字
72K。Vipul Bhrigu坦承是为了减慢同事的进度让自己看上去好一点。当他的博后老板给以前的博士老板打电话时再次惊人的发现,Vipul
Bhrigu4月认罪,6月又回到Toledo大学做了博后,并谎称离开Michigan的原因是与新老板不和,终于被再次解雇。
It is sentencing day at Washtenaw County
Courthouse, a drab structure of stained grey
stone and tinted glass a few blocks from the
main campus of the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. Judge Elizabeth Pollard Hines has
doled out probation and fines for drunk and
disorderly conduct, shoplifting and other
mundane crimes on this warm July morning.
But one case, number 10-0596, is still
waiting. Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at
the university's Comprehensive Cancer
Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned
suit and a pinched expression as he cups his
pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When
Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order,
she has stern words for him: "I was inclined
to send you to jail when I came out here
this morning."
Bhrigu, over the course of several months
at Michigan, had meticulously and
systematically sabotaged the work of Heather
Ames, a graduate student in his lab, by
tampering with her experiments and poisoning
her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden
camera, Bhrigu confessed to university
police in April and pleaded guilty to
malicious destruction of personal property,
a misdemeanour that apparently usually
involves cars: in the spaces for make and
model on the police report, the arresting
officer wrote "lab research" and "cells".
Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that
he was compelled by "internal pressure" and
had hoped to slow down Ames's work. Speaking
earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was
a complete lack of moral judgement on my
part," he said.
Bhrigu's actions are surprising, but
probably not unique. There are few firm
numbers showing the prevalence of research
sabotage, but conversations with graduate
students, postdocs and research-misconduct
experts suggest that such misdeeds occur
elsewhere, and that most go unreported or
unpoliced. In this case, the episode set
back research, wasted potentially tens of
thousands of dollars and terrorized a young
student. More broadly, acts such as Bhrigu's
— along with more subtle actions to hold
back or derail colleagues' work — have a
toxic effect on science and scientists. They
are an affront to the implicit trust between
scientists that is necessary for research
endeavours to exist and thrive.
Despite all this, there is little to
prevent perpetrators re-entering science. In
the United States, federal bodies that
provide research funding have limited
ability and inclination to take action in
sabotage cases because they aren't
interpreted as fitting the federal
definition of research misconduct, which is
limited to plagiarism, fabrication and
falsification of research data. In Bhrigu's
case, administrators at the University of
Michigan worked with police to investigate,
thanks in part to the persistence of Ames
and her supervisor, Theo Ross.
"The question is, how many universities
have such procedures in place that
scientists can go and get that kind of
support?" says Christine Boesz, former
inspector-general for the US National
Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia,
and now a consultant on scientific
accountability. "Most universities I was
familiar with would not necessarily be so
responsive."
First suspicions
Ames, an MD PhD student, first noticed a
problem with her research on 12 December
2009. As part of a study on the epidermal
growth factor receptor, a protein involved
in some cancers, she was running a western
blot assay to confirm the presence of
proteins in a sample. It was a routine
protocol. But when she looked at the blot,
four of her six samples seemed to be out of
order — the pattern of bands that she
expected to see in one lane appeared in
another. Five days later, it happened again.
"I thought, technically it could have been
my mistake, but it was weird that they had
gone wrong in exactly the same way," says
Ames. The only explanation, she reasoned,
was that the labelled lids for her cell
cultures had been swapped, and she
immediately wondered whether someone was
sabotaging her work. To be safe, she devised
a workaround: writing directly on the
bottoms of the culture dishes so that the
lids could not be switched.
Next, Ames started having an issue with
the western blots themselves. She saw an
additional protein in the sample lanes,
showing that an extra antibody was staining
the blot. Once again, it could have been a
mistake, but it happened twice. "I started
going over to my fiancé's lab and running
blots overnight there," she says. As the
problems mounted, Ames was getting agitated.
She was certain that someone was monkeying
with her experiments, but she had no proof
and no suspect. Her close friends suggested
that she was being paranoid.
Some labs are known to be
hyper-competitive, with principal
investigators pitting postdocs against each
other. But Ross's lab is a small, collegial
place. At the time that Ames was noticing
problems, it housed just one other graduate
student, a few undergraduates doing
projects, and the lab manager, Katherine
Oravecz-Wilson, a nine-year veteran of the
lab whom Ross calls her "eyes and ears". And
then there was Bhrigu, an amiable postdoc
who had joined the lab in April 2009.
Bhrigu had come to the United States from
India in 2003, and completed his PhD at the
University of Toledo, Ohio, under cancer
biologist James Trempe. "He was an average
student," says Trempe. "I wouldn't say that
he was a star in the lab, but there was
nothing that would make me question the work
that he did." Ross thought Bhrigu would be a
good fit with her lab — friendly, talkative,
up on current trends in the field. Ames says
that she liked Bhrigu and at the time had
little reason to suspect him. "He was one of
the last people I would have suspected
didn't like me," she says.
On Sunday 28 February 2010, Ames
encountered what she thought was another
attempt to sabotage her work. She was
replacing the media on her cells and
immediately noticed that something wasn't
right. The cells were "just dripping off the
plate", as if they'd been hit with something
caustic. She pulled the bottle of medium out
from the fume hood and looked at it.
Translucent ripples, like those that appear
when adding water to whisky, were visible in
the dark red medium. When she sniffed it,
the smell of alcohol was overpowering. This,
she thought, was the proof she needed. "It
was clearly not my mistake," says Ames.
She fired off an e-mail to Ross. "I just
found pretty convincing evidence that
somebody is trying to sabotage my
experiments," she wrote. Ross came and
sniffed the medium too. She agreed that it
didn't smell right, but she didn't know what
to think.
Lab investigation
Some people whom Ross consulted with tried
to convince her that Ames was hitting a
rough patch in her work and looking for
someone else to blame. But Ames was
persistent, so Ross took the matter to the
university's office of regulatory affairs,
which advises on a wide variety of rules and
regulations pertaining to research and
clinical care. Ray Hutchinson, associate
dean of the office, and Patricia Ward, its
director, had never dealt with anything like
it before. After several meetings and two
more instances of alcohol in the media, Ward
contacted the department of public safety —
the university's police force — on 9 March.
They immediately launched an investigation —
into Ames herself. She endured two
interrogations and a lie-detector test
before investigators decided to look
elsewhere.
At 4:00 a.m. on Sunday 18 April, officers
installed two cameras in the lab: one in the
cold room where Ames's blots had been
contaminated, and one above the refrigerator
where she stored her media. Ames came in
that day and worked until 5:00 p.m. On
Monday morning at around 10:15, she found
that her medium had been spiked again. When
Ross reviewed the tapes of the intervening
hours with Richard Zavala, the officer
assigned to the case, she says that her
heart sank. Bhrigu entered the lab at 9:00
a.m. on Monday and pulled out the culture
media that he would use for the day. He then
returned to the fridge with a spray bottle
of ethanol, usually used to sterilize lab
benches. With his back to the camera, he
rummaged through the fridge for 46 seconds.
Ross couldn't be sure what he was doing, but
it didn't look good.
Zavala escorted Bhrigu to the campus
police department for questioning. When he
told Bhrigu about the cameras in the lab,
the postdoc asked for a drink of water and
then confessed. He said that he had been
sabotaging Ames's work since February. (He
denies involvement in the December and
January incidents.)
Motives for misconduct
Misbehaviour in science is nothing new —
but its frequency is difficult to measure.
Daniele Fanelli at the University of
Edinburgh, UK, who studies research
misconduct, says that overtly malicious
offences such as Bhrigu's are probably
infrequent, but other forms of indecency and
sabotage are likely to be more common. "A
lot more would be the kind of thing you
couldn't capture on camera," he says.
Vindictive peer review, dishonest reference
letters and withholding key aspects of
protocols from colleagues or competitors can
do just as much to derail a career or a
research project as vandalizing experiments.
These are just a few of the questionable
practices that seem quite widespread in
science, but are not technically considered
misconduct. In a meta-analysis of misconduct
surveys, published last year (D. Fanelli
PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009), Fanelli found that
up to one-third of scientists admit to
offences that fall into this grey area, and
up to 70% say that they have observed them.
Some say that the structure of the
scientific enterprise is to blame. The big
rewards — tenured positions, grants, papers
in stellar journals — are won through
competition. To get ahead, researchers need
only be better than those they are competing
with. That ethos, says Brian Martinson, a
sociologist at HealthPartners Research
Foundation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, can
lead to sabotage. He and others have
suggested that universities and funders need
to acknowledge the pressures in the research
system and try to ease them by means of
education and rehabilitation, rather than
simply punishing perpetrators after the
fact.
But did rivalry drive Bhrigu? He and Ames
were collaborating on one of their projects,
but they were not in direct competition.
Chiron Graves, a former graduate student in
Ross's lab who helped Bhrigu learn
techniques, says that Ross is passionate but
didn't put undue stress on her personnel.
"The pressures that exist in the system as a
whole are somewhat relieved in Theo's lab,"
says Graves, now an assistant professor
running a teacher-education programme at
Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.
"Her take was to do good science."
Bhrigu says that he felt pressure in
moving from the small college at Toledo to
the much bigger one in Michigan. He says
that some criticisms he received from Ross
about his incomplete training and his work
habits frustrated him, but he doesn't blame
his actions on that. "In any kind of
workplace there is bound to be some
pressure," he says. "I just got jealous of
others moving ahead and I wanted to slow
them down."
Crime and punishment
At Washtenaw County Courthouse in July,
having reviewed the case files, Pollard
Hines delivered Bhrigu's sentence. She
ordered him to pay around US$8,800 for
reagents and experimental materials, plus
$600 in court fees and fines — and to serve
six months' probation, perform 40 hours of
community service and undergo a psychiatric
evaluation.
But the threat of a worse sentence hung
over Bhrigu's head. At the request of the
prosecutor, Ross had prepared a more
detailed list of damages, including Bhrigu's
entire salary, half of Ames's, six months'
salary for a technician to help Ames get
back up to speed, and a quarter of the lab's
reagents. The court arrived at a possible
figure of $72,000, with the final amount to
be decided upon at a restitution hearing in
September.
Before that hearing could take place,
however, Bhrigu and his wife left the
country for India. Bhrigu says his visa was
contingent upon having a job. A new hearing
has been scheduled for October in which the
case for restitution will be heard alongside
arguments that Bhrigu has violated his
probation.
Ross, though, is happy that the ordeal is
largely over. For the month-and-a-half of
the investigation, she became reluctant to
take on new students or to hire personnel.
She says she considered packing up her
research programme. She even questioned her
own sanity, worrying that she was the one
sabotaging Ames's work via "an alternate
personality". Ross now wonders if she was
too trusting, and urges other lab heads to
"realize that the whole spectrum of humanity
is in your lab. So, when someone complains
to you, take it seriously."
She also urges others to speak up when
wrongdoing is discovered. After Bhrigu
pleaded guilty in June, Ross called Trempe
at the University of Toledo. He was shocked,
of course, and for more than one reason. His
department at Toledo had actually re-hired
Bhrigu. Bhrigu says that he lied about the
reason he left Michigan, blaming it on
disagreements with Ross. Toledo let Bhrigu
go in July, not long after Ross's call.
Now that Bhrigu is in India, there is
little to prevent him from getting back into
science. And even if he were in the United
States, there wouldn't be much to stop him.
The National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, through its Office of
Research Integrity, will sometimes bar an
individual from receiving federal research
funds for a time if they are found guilty of
misconduct. But Bhigru probably won't face
that prospect because his actions don't fit
the federal definition of misconduct, a
situation Ross finds strange. "All
scientists will tell you that it's
scientific misconduct because it's tampering
with data," she says.
Still, more immediate concerns are keeping
Ross busy. Bhrigu was in her lab for about a
year, and everything he did will have to be
repeated. Reagents that he used have been
double-checked or thrown away. Ames says her
work was set back five or six months, but
she expects to finish her PhD in the spring.
For her part, Ames says that the
experience shook her trust in her chosen
profession. "I did have doubts about
continuing with science. It hurt my idea of
science as a community that works together,
builds upon each other's work and
collaborates." Nevertheless, she has begun
to use her experience to help teach others,
and has given a seminar about the
experience, with Ross, to new graduate
students. She says that the assistance she
got from Ross and others helped her cope
with the ordeal.
"It did help restore the trust," she says.
"In a sense I was lucky that we could catch
it." (timeline)
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