There were three recent scandals at MPIs a few weeks to months back, the most recent one being: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-empath

There were three recent scandals at MPIs a few weeks to months back, the most recent one being: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-empathy-researcher-colleagues-say-she-bullied-and-intimidated-them http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-emp... I'm glad that this new Guardian article highlights that it is a structural problem. When reading up on the MPI cases it seemed as if it was a problem of few labs only. Due to the power imbalance, as a to-be-PhD student you are strongly advised to experience several labs before making a decision where to go. Don't only look at metrics such as reputation. It is incredibly hard to find a good PhD advisor, and intuition trained by good and bad experiences does help. Similarly bad are people in those labs who don't recognize the behaviour as such because they either have never experienced a non-dysfunctional lab or see benefit in licking upwards (they may hope they can be in the intimidating position one time). Every party enabling this seems to confuse abusiveness with strength and assertiveness. Is it Stockholm syndrome? The supervisor's perspective is that grant pressure can be very stressful. But as soon as multiple people agree to the point that they file formal complaints the problem can't be the PhD student anymore. I have still proportionally seen more functional than dysfunctional labs in science though, great labs do exist. I would expect that the problem is much worse in industry than in academia.