A friend of mine did her PhD in a prestigious lab in basic medical sciences. A postdoc in the lab was quite clearly fabricating data, but the PI refused to beli

A friend of mine did her PhD in a prestigious lab in basic medical sciences. A postdoc in the lab was quite clearly fabricating data, but the PI refused to believe it. The postdoc got a tenure track position at a top ten department, from where he was quietly let go a couple years later when they figured out what was going on. The real tragedy is that, as the PI of my friend's lab was about to retire, the postdoc took decades of work--cell lines, antibodies, etc.--with him to start his new lab, and appears to have just thrown it all away when he lost his job. My own experience in academia was not nearly so bad, but I was pressured by my advisor to exclude some less-flattering results from a paper we wrote. I wanted to leave them in because I thought they illustrated some interesting trade-offs between our work and other approaches, but I wasn't brave enough to stand up to someone with the power to seriously fuck my life up.