What Do We Do With Monstrous Mentors?

It's time for a reckoning.

December 12, 2024

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rachel Mesch

"One of my Ph.D. students has a question: “How will I know when I’m ready to publish?” She is eager and hardworking, and I recognize the drive along with the mingling of confidence and trepidation. To be in her position is to have achieved at every level of schooling only to pursue a career laced with uncertainty. One that depends, at least in part, on the support of one’s mentors.

I assure her that I will guide her. I tell her that this is what happened for me in graduate school as I earned my Ph.D. in French literature. One of my professors, I’ll call her J, told me that my paper for her graduate seminar on women writers could be published with some simple revisions, and directed me toward Joan Kelly-Gadol’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Not long after, I submitted my paper to the Romanic Review, where it within a few months: “Did Women Have an Enlightenment? Graffigny’s Zilia as Female Philosophe.” It was my first publication."



Detection or Deception: The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Research Misconduct

New artificial intelligence tools help scientists fight back against a rising tide of research misconduct, but is it enough?

December 13, 2024

The Scientist

Danielle Gerhard, PhD

"In 2015, Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney, noticed something strange while browsing papers related to her past research. A handful of papers recently published by separate research groups had all linked the expression of a gene that she had cloned in the 1990s with different types of cancer. Byrne, who had studied cancer-associated genes for more than two decades, recalled, “That struck me as strange because for many years no one had been interested in this gene.” In fact, in Byrne and her colleagues’ investigation of the gene, they realized early on that there was limited evidence for this gene as an important driver of cancer development. “If we, as the people who cloned the gene, weren't interested in the gene in cancer, well, why would anyone else be?” she wondered. 

When she looked into the details of the papers, including the methods and materials sections, she noticed several mistakes in the nucleotide sequences.1 “[The nucleotide sequences] weren't peripheral to the research; they were absolutely core to the research, so if they were wrong, everything was wrong,” said Byrne."

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