Archive for the 'Tribe of Science' category

Unpaid internships are a systemic labor exploitation scam- yes, in science labs too.

Jun 12 2013 Published by under #FWDAOTI, Academics, Tribe of Science

Tweep @biochemprof pointed to a story of the day about a judicial ruling that unpaid interns on a movie production should have been paid. The story via via NBC:

In the decision, Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that Fox Searchlight should have paid two interns on the movie “Black Swan,” because they were essentially regular employees.

The judge noted that these internships did not foster an educational environment and that the studio received the benefits of the work. The case could have broad implications. Young people have flocked to internships, especially against the backdrop of a weak job market.

"Weak job market", my eye. I still recall the disbelief I was in during the end of my senior year in college when my friends described how they "had to" take unpaid internships. There were several industries (I can't recall the specifics at this far remove) for which my fellow newly bachelor degree'd worker drones were convinced they had to start their careers by working for free. Having secured what I thought was a pretty good gig, being paid the 2013 equivalent of $23,000 per year to earn my PhD, I felt comparatively fortunate. There is no way in hell, or so I thought at the time, that I would be able to have followed such a path. I needed to do something that was going to put a roof over my head and at least some cheap pasta on the table. As I've mentioned in the past, I grew up in an academic household. So the parental support for me going into academics was pretty good. However, it was by no means a fantastically well-off household either, being academic, and there was no way in hell my parents were going to pay all my bills deep into my 20s. I had to get a job that was going to pay me something. So I did.

As far as I can tell, the phenomenon of "unpaid internships" for both recent college grads and other long term or temporary would-be-workers has not diminished substantially.

Unpaid internships are a labor-exploitation scam.

Period.

In any industry.

And according to the NBC bit, this is the beginning of a long slog of court cases making exactly this point.

The “Black Swan” case was the first in a series of lawsuits filed by unpaid interns.

In February 2012, a former Harper’s Bazaar intern sued Hearst Magazines, asserting that she regularly worked 40 to 55 hours a week without being paid. Last July, a federal court ruled that the plaintiff could proceed with her lawsuit as a collective action, certifying a class of all unpaid interns who worked in the company’s magazines division since February 2009. This February, an unpaid intern sued Elite Model Management, seeking $50 million.

After a lawsuit brought by unpaid interns, Charlie Rose and his production company announced last December that they would pay back wages to as many as 189 interns. The settlement called for many of the interns to receive about $1,100 each — amounting to roughly $110 a week in back pay, for a maximum of 10 weeks, the approximate length of a school semester.

As part of his ruling on Tuesday, Judge Pauley also granted class certification to a group of unpaid interns in New York who worked in several divisions of the Fox Entertainment Group.

Good.

Look, obviously there will be much legal parsing about the relative benefit of unpaid work to both the employer and the employee. But the basic principles should be clear and easily understood in plain language and we should be highly attentive to where the putative "educational" or "training" benefit to the employee is being oversold and the relative work-product benefit to the employer is being intentionally undersold to justify the exploitation.

This brings me to us, DearReader. By which I mean my academic science peers, our research laboratories and the phenomenon of undergraduate or high-school "interns" who work without financial compensation. It is wrong, exploitative and immoral. We, you... our industry as a whole, should knock it off.

I am not swayed by arguments that you and your lab put more effort into summer interns than you get back in return. If this is so, stop taking them. Clearly, if you do take them then you get some sort of benefit. Even if that benefit is only that you can brag that you have trained numerous undergraduates or "provided a research experience" to several. But in many cases, these freebie interns do much that is of value and that you would otherwise have to pay someone else in the lab to do. At worst, this saves your lab on technician salaries or frees up the time of the betters in the lab to work on the more complicated stuff instead of washing glassware or making up buffers. In better situations the intern produces data that helps the lab forward on a project.

If this is the case, ever, then you have exploited the internship scam. You have accepted someone working for you for free. This is almost mind bogglingly immoral to me and I do not know how my fellow left-leaning academic types can bring themselves to ignore it.

I don't care one whit that you have 10 or 20 requests each and every Spring from some undergrad on campus or some undergrad from another University that happens to live in your town and is home for the summer. I get them myself. They make it clear that they expect no compensation...all this tells me is that our business has successfully created a system of exploitation. We have convinced the suckers that they "have to" take these positions to advance in their own career goals.

This is absolutely no different from times in the past, prior to labor protections, in which workers "had to" accept dangerous working conditions, longer than 40 hour weeks, no breaks, employment of juveniles, low pay, company stores/towns that stole back much of the wages, etc, etc. The list is lengthy. In every case the industry had fantastic reasons for why they "had to" treat their employees in such a way. The workers themselves were often convinced things "had to" be that way. And what do you know? After hard fought labor protections were put in place the industries got along just fine.

So far, I have gotten along just fine without exploiting unpaid interns in my laboratory. If they are not getting compensated in some way, they don't work in my lab. I plan to stick with this principle. In my book, training, recommendation letters and the nebulous concept of experience do not qualify as compensation. There should be an hourly wage that is at least as great as the local minimum wage. In some cases, under the formal structure of an undergraduate institution, course credit can be acceptable compensation. I would recommend keeping this to a minimum, particularly when it comes to summer internships and/or work conducted outside of the academic semester. With respect to this latter, no, you can't skate on the scam that they are just finishing up what they started under a for-credit stint during the regular academic calendar.

In addition to the general immorality of science labs exploiting the powerless (those desiring to enter the career) there is another factor for you to consider. The unpaid internship scam has the effect of blocking the financially disadvantaged from entering a particular career. Think about your mental (or your department's formal) graduate admissions schema. Does it prioritize those who have had some prior experience working in a research laboratory, preferably in a closely related field of work? Of course it does. Which means it prioritizes those who could afford to gain such experiences. Those who had parents who were willing to float their rent and food bills over the summer months instead of making them find a real job, such as installing itchy insulation in scorching hot attics for 10 hr days, digging ditches, busing tables or changing oil filters. (As I have come to hear postdocs making upwards of $35,000 per year and graduate students $29,000 per year -- Federal minimum wage is about $15,000 at present -- complain about their treatment, I am certainly coming to reconsider which type of undergraduate summer experience is really the best way to select doctoral students.)

Even if we do not apply an admissions filter, how would the latter type of undergraduate student even come to appreciate that a laboratory career might be for them?

Clearly the solution is to find a way to pay our scientific interns. Much of the time, these mechanisms exist and it is mere laziness on the part of the PI that keeps the intern from being paid. There are administrative supplements to NIH grants for disadvantaged students that are, from what I hear, pretty much there for the asking as they are underutilized. Local summer-experience programs, small scale philanthropy and academic senate funds. Even if you cough up some grant money, what does 10 weeks cost you? Not that much. Can you look yourself square in the mirror and tell yourself honestly that you can't afford the outlay from your grant and that you are not getting any value out of this prospective intern?

I can't.

Unpaid internships are as much a scam and a labor exploitation in academic science labs as they are at Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Knock it off people.

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100 responses so far

Post-publication peer review and preprint fans

Jun 06 2013 Published by under Peer Review, PLoS ONE, Science Publication, Science Writing, Scientific Publication, Tribe of Science

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea for the biomedical sciences has to have served as an Associate Editor for at least 50 submitted manuscripts or there is no reason to listen to their opinion.

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27 responses so far

LinkedIn: yea or nay?

Jun 04 2013 Published by under Scientific Mentoring, Tribe of Science

It's been a few years but I still have about the same approach to LinkedIn. I'm on there mostly for the networking that might extend to my trainees and other junior scientists in the field. I don't find it that useful for me in any direct sense.

How about you, Dear Reader*?

UPDATE 06/05/2013: Arlenna points to a page on creepy LinkedIn behavior and a privacy setting you might want to check.

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*and PhysioProf

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43 responses so far

I wonder what happened to that lab?

Apr 29 2013 Published by under Day in the life of DrugMonkey, Tribe of Science

Many years ago when I was a much younger scientist, reading through the literature was occasionally frustrating. I'd come across a lab working on some question of interest and wonder why they just.....stopped, almost before they got going. Often the authors in question never returned to the published literature and I would wonder what happened.

Later on, in a few cases I would run into them again.....maybe they went to Administration in their University, maybe became a NIH Program Officer, perhaps ended up in BigPharma or publishing. In other cases there was never much trace to explain what happened.

I think we can assume it was frequently grant money-related.

We're facing another round of the phenomenon, I sense. The current economic climate for biomedical research scientists is very grim. You know this. News of 5%ile paylines posted by at least one NIH Institute is gripping. In the bad way.

The rumble of labs closed due to loss of grant support is swelling. No longer a FOAF, either, but someone you know. The degrees of separation will shrink. People will be lost from science.

This means that future bright eyed graduate students or postdocs will read and wonder.

"What happened to that lab", they will ponder, "the papers were leading somewhere cool but they just stopped".

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Eve Marder on the vagaries of life.

Apr 18 2013 Published by under Academics, Postdoctoral Training, Postgraduate Training, Scientific Mentoring, Tribe of Science

Eve Marder has an opinion piece up in which she discusses the "luck" involved in career outcomes.

Our present world is filled with great angst. Our junior faculty are writing too many grant applications for not enough money. Our postdocs rightfully feel that they are in purgatory, not knowing when and if there will be an academic position for them, should they desire one. Our graduate students are watching the struggles of postdocs and faculty. For me, this era is especially frustrating, because it is a time of extraordinary opportunity for scientific discovery, and it is criminal that our young scientists can not experience the excitement and challenge of scientific discovery without being worried about their futures.
There is no right answer to the question of how long a talented scientist can or should remain in a ‘looking for a job’ limbo. Every individual must take into account their own ambitions and circumstances as they try to answer this question. And all of us should also be aware that we have the potential to be successful in many careers, in and out of science.

Go read (and comment).

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Sciquester Tales: PIs are just not "creative" enough

Mar 04 2013 Published by under Academics, NIH Careerism, Postdoctoral Training, Tribe of Science, Twitts

from someone on the Twitts going by @ilovepigenetics

Annoyed that PIs prefer to cut positions vs. experiments. #sciquester #dotherightthing #shortsighted Fewer jobs=less taxes=less funding

this was followed with an interesting response to YHN:

@drugmonkeyblog Do the right thing. You have a responsibility to your trainees.

and the lunacy goes on (reverse chron):

  1. @SciTriGrrl @BabyAttachMode I choose to pay my people and live on 75% salary. Is it hard, yes. Am I lucky that I can do it, yes.
  2. @SciTriGrrl We are smart people. Don't take the easy solution. Figure out a smart solution.
  3. @BabyAttachMode @SciTriGrrl Who needs the $ the most-a PI who makes ~100K or a student who makes $25 K?
  4. @neuromusic @drugmonkeyblog Find ways to make it cheaper. I'm very disappointed. You have a responsibility to those you took on.
  5. @SciTriGrrl Cut your salary. Don't hire new people, but your first responsibility is your trainees. $25K doesn't support a student or a PD.
  6. Lessons from my Father: Cut YOUR salary if you must, but pay your people first. The #1 rule I learned from my Dad, a small business owner.

There are two main problems here. The first one is related to whom the PI owes "responsibility".

The NIH Grant funded PI typically has a number of responsibilities in my view.

She has a laboratory of employees and trainees with a good bit of smear between who is an employee and who is a trainee. On the one end is the straight-up employee who is a technician and on the other end an undergraduate "volunteering in the lab for experience". The former might have a reasonable expectation of life-time employment (within the confines of normal variation and the grant cycles). In between there are the postdocs who are on for a 2-3 year training stint without explicit expectation of a life-time job and graduate students who are there to achieve a semi-defined task (the doctorate). The PI has a responsibility to do well by these people, there is little doubt. But there is also little doubt that perfection cannot be achieved for everyone. Not everyone is going to have an outcome commensurate with their expectations. This is reality, not evidence of a PI who is uncaring, irresponsible or insufficiently "creative".

The PI also has a laboratory. This is the edifice built by and for the prior trainees, the current trainees, the future trainees, the PI herself...and her University. Sometimes this laboratory has been inherited from a prior investigator (or a chain of investigators). It may be a laboratory that will obviously be passed down to subsequent investigators. It may be a laboratory that has enjoyed considerable University support over the years. It may have enjoyed considerable support from a specific Institute or Center of the NIH. The PI may have to compromise on other responsibilities to service her responsibility to the laboratory, from time to time.

The PI has a career. She has to continue to publish papers, secure funding and supervise research to keep this career going. You may view this as a selfish responsibility but hey, if you are complaining about the fact that another person is taking a career hit by the PI not being "creative" enough...you need to explain why one person's selfish goals are to be prioritized over another's.

The PI has a life. Just like you do. Sure they may be further along in years, stage(s) or whatnot than you are. They may have some things that you cannot see yourself ever attaining (like a mortgage, twopointseven kids and even a stay at home spouse. perhaps college bills for offspring). And their salary is clearly higher. It looks to you like they are totes moneybags and should just forgo 25% of their salary so that someone else can stay in their job for another 6 months. Guess what? It's time to get real. NIH grant supported investigators do make a lot more than postdocs do, mostly, but they are by no means insanely compensated. And just like you, they went through a period of training and fell into debt, behind the mortgage curve, behind the 401K explosion, they came along post-pension, etc, etc. Just like you they nursed ancient cars through postdoc and into the first years of faculty. They ate pasta. They did all that and got lucky to get a job. And started a life. And now they have people who depend on them to maintain that life. My sympathies are limited for those who claim that the people farther down the path just aren't responsible or creative enough to ensure that each and every person to come through their lab achieves the same outcome as they have.

There is another big one, this one related more to "what" the PI owes responsibility. I might suggest this is even the first priority of the NIH funded Principal Investigator.

The PI has a responsibility to the grant. You know, the tax payer funded money that has been dropped on the laboratory, under the PI's guidance, in expectation of some sort of return. A return of information, otherwise known as published papers. Yes, the PI has a HUGE part of her creativity and responsibility tied up in making sure that some science actually occurs. Published science. It is very easy for the trainee who has just been told that they have two months to find a new job to overlook this. The PI should be a good steward of the public purse. And sometimes that role is going to conflict with the above mentioned responsibilities to staff members. This is why the salvo from @ilovepigenetics about prioritizing salary lines over experiments drew my attention, btw.

If you keep people employed "over experiments" this means that the experiments aren't getting done. Or aren't getting done efficiently. Then where are we? If you can't buy reagents, can't analyze all the samples in the freezer, can't support cage costs, can't maintain mouse lines, can't buy rats, can't recruit human subjects, can't afford scanner time... then everything in the above list crashes down. Because eventually productivity suffers, no new grants come in, no new trainees can be afforded, the dollars eventually run out and everyone needs to be fired.

Just to avoid firing one postdoc today.

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postscript: This Twitt is also spectacularly clueless about the fact that the current extra good news of the sequester comes after a good 5-8 years of serious squeezing and pressure on the NIH budget and NIH funded scientific labs. PIs have been scrambling like crazy to be creative about funding, maintaining trainees salary lines as far as possible and to get the most work done that they can. Like crazy. For years now. And believe you me, this ain't news to any postdoc with half a brain. They've known about how bad things are for ages. If they've been burning the midnight St. Kern oil to write fellowships and papers and assist the PI with grants (so that s/he can get one more out per cycle) then hey, I'm a bit sympathetic. Somehow I suspect not all of them have been doing this though....

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It is always the chemists.

Mar 01 2013 Published by under FWDAOTI, Tribe of Science

Every year we get an annual safety meeting from our EH&S department and they show us a bunch of instructional slides on how to handle various laboratory hazards around the campus. They always include a few chuckles, like the guy operating plugged-in powertools standing on a ladder immersed in a pool, the guy Lincoln welding the gas tank of a truck propped up on a couple of bricks..that sort of thing.

And of course we go down the list of hazards from the chemical to the radiological to the microbiological. My department is usually in full eyeroll mode most of the time because of a simple fact. You know what never happens on our campus (touch wood)? We never have a Ebola infected African green monkey head for the hills. Nary a hantavirus rodent plague. Maybe someone gets a little sloppy with some low grade radioactive material now and again but that's rare. We don't have people getting infected with various nasty viruses and virulent (hmm) strains of bacteria they work with.

But you know what does happen on our campus? Regularly? Like 2-3 times a year?

Some chemist blows up a hood, erupts a waste bottle, causes a fire in the lab bays or otherwise renders a building uninhabitable. In dramatic fashion.

Causing the Fire Department to have to respond and anyone working in the building to lose at least a day.

It is always the chemists.

I have never really understood why.

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A little reminder of why we have IRBs. Did I mention it is still Black History Month?

Feb 20 2013 Published by under Conduct of Science, Ethics, Scientific Misconduct, Staring in Disbelief, Tribe of Science

Reputable citizen-journalist Comradde PhysioProffe has been investigating the doings of a citizen science project, ubiome. Melissa of The Boundary Layer blog has nicely explicated the concerns about citizen science that uses human subjects.

And this brings me to what I believe to be the potentially dubious ethics of this citizen science project. One of the first questions I ask when I see any scientific project involving collecting data from humans is, “What institutional review board (IRB) is monitoring this project?” An IRB is a group that is specifically charged with protecting the rights of human research participants. The legal framework that dictates the necessary use of an IRB for any project receiving federal funding or affiliated with an investigational new drug application stems from the major abuses perpetrated by Nazi physicians during Word War II and scientists and physicians affiliated with the Tuskegee experiments. The work that I have conducted while affiliated with universities and with pharmaceutical companies has all been overseen by an IRB. I will certainly concede to all of you that the IRB process is not perfect, but I do believe that it is a necessary and largely beneficial process.

My immediate thought was about those citizen scientist, crowd-funded projects that might happen to want to work with vertebrate animals.

I wonder how this would be received:

“We’ve given extensive thought to our use of stray cats for invasive electrophysiology experiments in our crowd funded garage startup neuroscience lab. We even thought really hard about IACUC approvals and look forward to an open dialog as we move forward with our recordings. Luckily, the cats supply consent when they enter the garage in search of the can of tuna we open every morning at 6am.”

Anyway, in citizen-journalist PhysioProffe's investigations he has linked up with an amazing citizen-IRB-enthusiast. A sample from this latter's recent guest post on the former's blog blogge.

Then in 1972, a scandal erupted over the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. This study, started in 1932 by the US Public Health Service, recruited 600 poor African-American tenant farmers in Macon County, Alabama: 201 of them were healthy and 399 had syphilis, which at the time was incurable. The purpose of the study was to try out treatments on what even the US government admitted to be a powerless, desperate demographic. Neither the men nor their partners were told that they had a terminal STD; instead, the sick men were told they had “bad blood” — a folk term with no basis in science — and that they would get free medical care for themselves and their families, plus burial insurance (i.e., a grave plot, casket and funeral), for helping to find a cure.

When penicillin was discovered, and found in 1947 to be a total cure for syphilis, the focus of the study changed from trying to find a cure to documenting the progress of the disease from its early stages through termination. The men and their partners were not given penicillin, as that would interfere with the new purpose: instead, the government watched them die a slow, horrific death as they developed tumors and the spirochete destroyed their brains and central nervous system. Those who wanted out of the study, or who had heard of this new miracle drug and wanted it, were told that dropping out meant paying back the cost of decades of medical care, a sum that was far beyond anything a sharecropper could come up with.

CDC: U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee
NPR: Remembering Tuskegee
PubMed: Syphilitic Gumma

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Hurdles for the Crowdfunding Science Wackanuts to Overcome

Feb 14 2013 Published by under Tribe of Science, Twitts

I was having a few exchanges with successful science-project crowdfunder Ethan Perlstein (@perelste) who apparently was on NPR today. Good for him, good for his project, whee.

This stuff can work fine for small scale projects, one offs, etc. But placing this in the context of an alternative or replacement for major federal funding is deeply flawed.

1) Overhead rate. Now admittedly, not all Universities bother going after their indirect costs for small philanthropic donations. But if a lab tries to exist on this strategy? You can be damn sure they are going to come after indirects. Some Universities do this already. And donors don't like it. You can bet there's some fancy tapdancing trying to figure out how to minimize revealing to the medium ticket donors that their donation are getting taxed. The big ones fight it, obvs.

2) Chump change. Sorry but it is. Perlstein raised $25K. The NIH R03 is $50K for two years. The R21 is $275K over two years and the R01, as we've discussed, is most typically $250K (in direct costs, mind you) for 4-5 years. There is going to be very, very little that can be accomplished with the kind of cash that is available via crowdfunding.

3) Yeahbut! The uBiome and American Gut projects raised over $600K, man! Yeah, the former is at $286,548 and the latter is at $339,541 as of this writing. Impressive. Right? but the total is less than the cost of two years of NIH R01 funding. And these may be the best examples. Time will show how many of these can go viral and make big bucks, how many can get $25,000 and how many struggle to get $5,000. Color me extremely skeptical on the big-bucks ones.

4) Can it repeat? That's another critical question. All well and good for Perlstein to pull down $25K in crowdfunding. But he needs to do it again. and again. and again. No offense but crowd funding works the first time on novelty, your buddies and people looking to make a point. Think they'd be lining up to throw down for Perlstein's second project in such numbers? Will people who don't even know him flog the shit out of the Twitt stream like they did for his Meth study? Here's a hint: hell no.

5) Deliverables. Part of the problem is the nature of the deliverables. What is the crowd to see that has been done with their money? Well, from Perlstein's project description, the data are going up online as they roll in. So...figures. basically. Not even clear that there will be a pub on which they can be acknowledged. The small scope of the project make it likely that at best one publishable panel will result. And dude, will regular journals put up with the Supplementary Acknowledgement Table approach so all donors can be listed? maybe. but what, now you are going to return to the same crowd and say "Hey, throw down another $25K and we'll do Figure 2...if I still have a job, that is".

6) Science is a tough sell. Still. It is extremely difficult to see where anything Perlstein happens to find about the intracellular distribution of methamphetamine is going to so engage the crowd that it jumps in with more funding. This is pretty basic science. It would take "I am mere inches away from curing Meth addiction" level stuff to grab the crowd if you ask me (and anyway, if you did that, Pharma would come a'callin'). In contrast, I offer the outcome for one of my favorite scifi authors. Tobias Buckell had a decent fan base, a book series for which there was a clamor for more from his crowd and he was asking for a mere $10K. He raised it, wrote the book and delivered that sucker to his readers (Kickstarter backers and nonbackers alike). It was, to my read, the same book he would have written (and I would have purchased) if he'd had a schweet advance deal at a major publisher. Or if he'd (somehow) still been able to write on spec like a noob author. Same damn product. Can we say the same for a $25k SCIENCE project? I think not.

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ORI Finding of Research Misconduct: Bryan Doreian

Feb 12 2013 Published by under Anger, Conduct of Science, Scientific Misconduct, Tribe of Science

The NOT-OD-13-039 was just published, detailing the many data faking offenses of one Bryan Doreian. There are 7 falsifications listed which include a number of different techniques but mostly involve falsely describing the number of samples/repetitions that were performed (4 charges) and altering the numeric values obtained to reach a desired result (3 charges). The scientific works affected included:

Doreian, B.W. ``Molecular Regulation of the Exocytic Mode in Adrenal Chromaffin Cells.' Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, August 2009; hereafter referred to as the ``Dissertation.'

Doreian, B.W., Fulop, T.G., Meklemburg, R.L., Smith, C.B. ``Cortical F-actin, the exocytic mode, and neuropeptide release in mouse chromaffin cells is regulated by myristoylated alanine-rich C-kinase substrate and myosin II.' Mol Biol Cell. 20(13):3142-54, 2009 Jul; hereafter referred to as the ``Mol Biol Cell paper.'

Doreian, B.W., Rosenjack, J., Galle, P.S., Hansen, M.B., Cathcart, M.K., Silverstein, R.L., McCormick, T.S., Cooper, K.D., Lu, K.Q. ``Hyper-inflammation and tissue destruction mediated by PPAR-γ activation of macrophages in IL-6 deficiency.' Manuscript prepared for submission to Nature Medicine; hereafter referred to as the ``Nature Medicine manuscript.'

The ORI notice indicates that Doreian will request that the paper be retracted.

There were a couple of interesting points about this case. First, that Doreian has been found to have falsified information in his dissertation, i.e., that body of work that makes up the major justification for awarding him a PhD. From the charge list, it appears that the first 4 items were both included in the Mol Bio Cell paper and in his Dissertation. I will be very interested to see if Case Western Reserve University decides to revoke his doctorate. I tend to think that this is the right thing to do. If it were my Department this kind of thing would make me highly motivated to seek a revocation.

Second, this dissertation was apparently given an award by the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine:

The Doctoral Excellence Award in Biomedical Sciences is established to recognize exceptional research and scholarship in PhD programs at the School of Medicine. Nominees' work should represent highly original work that is an unusually significant contribution to the field. A maximum of one student per PhD program will be selected, but a program might not have a student selected in a particular year. The Graduate Program Directors chosen by the Office of Graduate Education will review the nominations and select recipients of each Award.
Eligibility

Open to graduating PhD students in Biochemistry, Bioethics, Biomedical Engineering, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Genetics, Molecular Medicine, Neurosciences, Nutrition, Pathology, Pharmacology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Systems Bio and Bioinformatics.

This sidebar indicates the 2010 winners are:

Biochemistry: Matthew Lalonde
Biomedical Engineering: Jeffrey Beamish
Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Johnie Rose
Neurosciences: Phillip Larimer
Nutrition: Charlie Huang
Pathology: Joshua Rosenblum
Pharmacology: Philip Kiser
Physiology and Biophysics: Bryan Doreian

Now obviously with such an award it is not a given that Mr. Doreian's data faking prevented another deserving individual from gaining this recognition and CV item. It may be that there were no suitable alternatives from his Department that year, certainly it did not get one in 2011. It may also be the case that his apparent excellence had no impact on the selection of other folks from other Departments...or maybe he did set a certain level that prevented other folks from gaining an award that year. Hard to say. This is unlike the zero sum nature of the NIH Grant game in which it is overwhelmingly the case that if a faker gets an award, this prevents another award being made to the next grant on the list.)

But still, this has the potential for the same problem with only discovering the fakes post-hoc. The damage to the honest scientist has already been done. There is another doctoral student who suffered at the hands of this fellow's cheating. This is even before we get to the more amorphous effect of "raising the bar" for student performance in the department.

Now fear not, it does appear that this scientific fraudster has left science.

Interestingly he appears to be engaging in a little bit of that Web presence massaging that we discussed in the case of alcohol research fraudster Michael Miller, Ph.D., last of SUNY Upstate. This new data faking fraudster Bryan Doreian, has set up a "brandyourself" page.

"Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to help anyone improve their own search results and online reputation.

Why should Mr. Doreian needs such a thing? Because he's pursuing a new career in tutoring for patent bar exams. Hilariously it has this tagline:

My name is Bryan and I am responsible for the operations, management and oversight of all projects here at WYSEBRIDGE. Apart from that some people say I am pretty good at data analysis and organization.

This echos something on the "brandyourself" page:

Bryan has spent years in bio- and medical- research, sharpening his knack for data analysis and analytical abilities while obtaining a PhD in Biophysics.

Well, the NIH ORI "says" that he is pretty good at, and/or has sharpened his knack for, faking data analysis. So I wonder who those "some people" might be at this point? His parents?

His "About" page also says:

Doctoral Studies

In 2005, I moved to Cleveland, OH to begin my doctoral studies in Cellular and Molecular Biophysics. As typical for a doctoral student, many hours were spent studying, investigating, pondering, researching, the outer fringes of information in order to attempt to make sense of what was being observed. 5 years later, I moved further on into medical research. After 2+ years and the conclusion of that phase of research, I turned my sights onto the Patent Bar Exam.

At this point you probably just want to take this down my friend. A little free advice. You don't want people coming to your new business looking into the sordid history of your scientific career as a fraudster, do you?

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