<story><title>Superconductivity scandal: the story of deception in a physics lab</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>levocardia</author><text>&amp;gt;Students say that Dias gave them an ultimatum: remove their names, or let him send the draft. Despite their worries, the students say they had no choice but to acquiesce. “I just remember being very intimidated,” one student says. The student says they regret not speaking up more to Dias. “But it’s scary at the time. What if I do and he makes the rest of my life miserable?”&lt;p&gt;Indeed it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; scary, because as a student your PI &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; in fact ruin your life and ruin your career, without much recourse in most cases. This behind-the-scenes is a good insight into the bad incentives and lack of accountability for PIs in academic research. I suspect this kind of thing happens all the time in smaller fields, and never gets discovered because it&amp;#x27;s not a headline-grabbing topic like room-temp superconductivity.&lt;p&gt;I had a bioengineering PhD friend who said she spotted obviously fraudulent papers all the time in her field--publications claiming they grew such-and-such bacteria in so-and-so medium, when she knew damn well that said bacteria &lt;i&gt;cannot&lt;/i&gt; grow in said medium.</text></comment>
<story><title>Superconductivity scandal: the story of deception in a physics lab</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dotnet00</author><text>In case others are coming into this thinking about LK-99, the article isn&amp;#x27;t about that.&lt;p&gt;I had figured the LK-99 team might actually have something interesting considering that they were promising a proper presentation of their work at the American Physical Society. I had heard it had been withdrawn and wrote it off as another case of academic fraud, but looking it up right now, apparently it&amp;#x27;s weirder than that.&lt;p&gt;Someone pretended to be the corresponding author and submitted a withdrawal, but this was fixed and the conference the presentation is at should be happening around these days.</text></comment>