ChemBark

Just like there is large subset of the Christian population that proclaims faith to be of deep personal importance but rarely finds time to attend weekly church services, there is a large contingent in academic chemistry that proclaims safety as the “top priority” but rarely finds time to participate in proper training. Where there are Christians who only make it to church once a year for Easter services, there are chemists who only bother with training during a 30-min annual refresher course. And just how calamitous personal events (e.g., life-threatening medical diagnoses) are often the only effective means of driving people to experience meaningful spiritual rebirth, it usually takes a tragic event to befall a chemist for an academic department to change the way it approaches safety.

In matters where science and religion clash, I will always side with science, but let’s not pretend scientists are immune to the hypocrisy of compromising their core values out of apathy or laziness. For the slogan “safety first” to carry any weight, it must be backed with action. Such action is generally missing from academic labs, where the slogans “papers first” or “money first” would probably be more suitable. If safety truly ranked first, we would spend more time on it than a few perfunctory lab inspections scattered around an annual refresher course.

If the importance of safety is genuinely held in such high regard—nobody will openly assert that safety is unimportant—then why aren’t training and compliance a bigger deal in academia? Sadly, the laxity of safety is so ingrained in our culture that the deficient system is perceived as normal. It wasn’t too long ago that R.B. Woodward proudly posed for photographs while smoking in his laboratory. In order to achieve meaningful improvement, someone is going to have to counteract this tremendous inertia and change the system.

There is probably a reluctance on the part of professors to institute any significant change because it will “eat up” valuable time. Every minute spent on safety training is a minute not spent running experiments. This fact I will concede, but there is one grand tradition of academic chemistry that manages to weather this criticism: the weekly group meeting. Practically every research group in the world abandons the lab to discuss their experimental results on a weekly basis. A significant fraction of these groups also invest time formally reviewing papers from the recent literature. The tacit implication of holding these meetings is clear: (i) results are important and (ii) keeping up with the literature is important. I see no reason why safety training should not be incorporated into weekly group meetings to emphasize that safety is also important.

How would such a plan be implemented? Professors could either devote an entire meeting (at some regular interval) to safety, or they could make safety a small part of every meeting. For instance, each time a student presents her research results, she could also include one slide devoted to safety. The lesson could deal with a hazard related to one of her experiments, or it could be something more general. The weekly emphasis on safety will help to reinforce the material by repetition and build a perceivable commitment to safety. From the standpoint of risk management, an ancillary benefit of having formal presentations is the creation of a paper trail (i.e., slides) that affirms training is conducted regularly.

The death of Sheri Sangji could have sparked a born-again devotion to safety in academia, but unfortunately, the progress seems largely limited to UCLA. Three years removed from Sangji’s death, many of the circumstances that led to her demise are still common problems in academic chemistry: there are many lab workers who don’t know when to use a cannula or that being contaminated with a pyrophoric material does not mean you must avoid the safety shower.  There are still people who fail to wear lab coats when working with nasty reagents—or who use lab coats made of polyester or cotton in blissful ignorance of their flammability. As with Sheri Sangji’s death, the news of the draconian charges leveled against Patrick Harran represents another opportunity for we, as chemists, to reassess our values and how we conduct research. While weaving safety into the “traditional” group meeting will not replace the need for hands-on training or enforcement of compliance, even if only in small amounts, it will be beneficial for safety to be included within this sacrosanct ritual. For any value to take hold, it must be practiced religiously.

Jyllian Kemsley has a post that summarizes all of the coverage and commentary on the UCLA/Harran news. Her blog is undoubtedly the best place to follow developments in this story. The case has so many component issues that one could easily write 20,000 words and still not feel the subject has been properly analyzed. Instead of doing that, let me start off with some preliminary thoughts:

I am not a lawyer. I am almost completely unfamiliar with California labor law and OSHA requirements for how employers must ensure safe laboratory conditions for their employees. Harran may have broken the law; he may not have. I can’t render a reliable opinion of his prospective guilt with regard to the charges.

Severity of charges. While I’m not a lawyer, I think I’m entitled to a loose opinion of what makes sense in this case. The idea that Harran faces up to 4.5 years in prison seems excessive to me, especially when you consider that Harran probably oversaw the safety of his lab in a manner typical of most top-flight professors. Is the state of California going to attempt to imprison every professor whose students don’t wear lab coats, or just the professors who happen to be at the helm when an accidental death occurs?

Punishment. While I believe that a prison term would not be warranted for a conviction in this case, there must be some serious punishment for failing to maintain a safe laboratory work environment. Lack of holding management responsible for running unsafe labs is probably one major reason the culture of academic safety is broken. For the most part, states have left schools to police themselves with regard to safety, and guess what…schools (id est, faculties…id est, professors) don’t impose any meaningful punishments on themselves. With respect to Harran, I think the charges should be “wobbled” down to misdemeanors that can draw smaller fines (in the thousands, not millions) and a shorter suspended sentence (if Harran is convicted). The (seemingly) most appropriate and meaningful punishment for a manager/PI who runs an unsafe lab is termination. While I don’t think a court could force the university to fire a professor, if the university retains a PI known for running an unsafe lab, it is sending a rotten message. At present, UCLA seems to be standing by Harran.

Prospective jurors won’t be chemists. Most of us have worked around academic labs for several years and are familiar with the element of laxity in these environments. While we accept this culture as normal, I think it will be easy for an experienced lawyer to highlight some of the aspects of life in an academic lab in a way that members of the public (including jurors) will find appalling.

Nonsensical laws. I lack the experience of a lawyer or legislator, but there are certain aspects of the law that seem silly to me. For instance, Sheri was a lab tech, and apparently, the law treats lab techs differently from grad students. Here, Sheri was doing the exact same type of work as a grad student. This disparity doesn’t make any sense to me and just illustrates that academic scientists have not been very effective at lobbying to change silly laws. You see it all the time in safety. Why does 1 gallon of isopropanol/KOH in a 5-gallon container “count” as 5 gallons of flammable solvent during fire inspections (against a 10-gallon-per-room limit)? The 1 gallon is “safer” to use in a 5-gallon container than a 1-gallon container (i.e., no splashing out of the bucket). Also, why can’t safety showers be hooked into the drainage system of a building? What, exactly, is being protected there?

Who gets the blame when everyone is to blame? This case seems headed for a tort, which means that someone is going to have to figure out how to apportion blame for Sangji’s death. While it looks like Harran didn’t have his responsibilities under control, neither did Sangji. It was her responsibility to wear a lab coat (assuming one was available), and my feeling is that even though she wasn’t a Ph.D. chemist, she most likely knew that she was working with a dangerous material in an iffy way (3 x full syringe vs. cannula). Sheri paid the ultimate price for her negligence. Now, how much will UCLA and Harran have to pay (if anything)? I have no idea how one begins to address this issue quantitatively.

Will this case result in constructive change? The culture of safety in academic labs is broken. The tragic accident that occurred at UCLA could have easily happened at hundreds of other schools around the country, because the extent to which lab workers are trained—and monitored for compliance—in academia is a joke. My dissatisfaction centers on two main issues: (i) the actual safety knowledge of lab workers in academia is poor and (ii) safety programs at universities seem focused on limiting liability rather than actually improving worker safety. I imagine there are a few exceptional departments in the United States, but I challenge anyone to mount a tenable argument against this assessment. I really don’t see the Harran charges doing much to improve the first point, and I think the second issue will be severely exacerbated by this case. It would be nice if safety officers at schools could focus more on actually training students than devising vapid PowerPoint slides that “cover all the bases”.

Bengu Sezen is a monster.  There can be no doubt of that.  She purposely fabricated data for self-advancement, showed utter contempt for the scientific community by publishing these lies, and demonstrated an egregious lack of consideration for her colleagues in her desperate and futile attempts to save her career.

Scientists who commit fraud on such a massive scale as Sezen are probably unsalvageable.  We can’t realistically expect to reform them or assume they will respond to reason.  Our only hope is to prevent these psychopaths from doing serious damage.  Now that the investigation is over, the biggest question in the wake of Sezen’s rampage of falsification is not “why did she do it?” but “how did the problem get so big?”  It is at this point that our focus shifts to her advisor, Professor Dalibor Sames. 

I think any analysis of Sames must begin by addressing—and largely, dismissing—two of the foulest rumors that have wafted out of Morningside Heights.  First, to my knowledge, there is no evidence that Sames actively participated in the fabrication of data—whether by doing it, ordering it, or knowing that it was done. Second, to my knowledge, there is no compelling evidence that Sames and Sezen were ever involved in a romantic relationship.  Such a relationship would probably have fallen under the scope of the school’s investigation, yet no (non-redacted) comments on the matter appeared in the Columbia Report.  This is just conjecture, but it seems like the romance rumor could have easily arisen out of the idea that Sezen was a “golden child” who was treated so well by Sames that “something must have been going on between them.”  Regardless, I am excluding the existence of such a relationship from the present analysis.

Now, where do we begin?

I am sympathetic to the weight of responsibility that advisors bear when it comes to policing their laboratories.  It is never fun to be the bad guy, and it is especially difficult to question the motives of colleagues who are working behind the scenes to advance your career.  Nonetheless, quality control is an important part of the job of research advisors, and they can’t escape this chore just because it is thankless.  Would you employ a janitor who did a great job cleaning offices and hallways but refused to clean bathrooms?  No.

I also realize that ferreting scientific misconduct out of your laboratory can, in many cases, be a very difficult task.  Some people are especially adept at deception, and while we expect advisors to remain vigilant, they can’t be omnipresent and we don’t want them micromanaging their students.  Any response by an advisor to a case of scientific misconduct must be judged in the context of how well the deception was hidden.

And this is exactly why so many people are outraged at Sames: the deception was not particularly well hidden and he responded to it poorly.  Sezen joined the Sames laboratory in December 2000, and by the end of 2002, she had published her first paper with fabricated data.  At this point in the story, I expect a sizable percentage of the community wouldn’t find any serious fault with Sames.  This one paper doesn’t constitute an enormous body of fraudulent work, and Sezen probably talked a good game to disguise her fabrication from Sames well.

On the other hand, the counterargument that Sames was at fault from the very beginning is also compelling.  It is reasonably clear that Sames did not conduct rigorous quality control of the work in his lab.  By all accounts, Sezen’s notebooks contained garbage, so he must not have looked at them carefully.  Sames must also not have had someone else verify Sezen’s new chemistry independently.  (If this safeguard had been in place, it would have been mentioned in the investigatory report.)  Before you start crying that such an expectation is absurd, consider that these reactions are very straightforward and don’t require complex intermediates.  Verification of the procedures, presumably, would have been relatively painless.  One should also consider that at the time, Sames was an assistant professor not far removed from an exceptional career at the bench; he could have easily run these reactions himself if he had wanted.  It doesn’t seem like he did.

If just that one bogus paper were published, I don’t think any school could take action against Sames because there is no accepted practice in the synthetic community for what advisors should do before reporting new methods.  Some advisors look through their students’ notebooks; most don’t.  Some advisors inspect their students’ NMR spectra; most don’t.  Some advisors have other lab members verify novel reactions; most don’t.  Unfortunately, Sames’ troubles don’t boil down to one instance of negligence, but a sustained atmosphere of negligence that allowed the situation to explode in magnitude over the course of three years.

Several of Sezen’s labmates reported difficulty reproducing the results of her first paper even before its publication in JACS.  Over the next three years, multiple students within the lab continued to report serious problems to Sames with regard to getting the chemistry to work.  Outside Columbia, scientists contacted Sames to report similar trouble.  Shockingly, instead of refocusing on the original set of reactions to nail-down a solid, reproducible procedure and bring an end to the concerns, Sames went on to publish *five* new papers with Sezen as first author, each reporting more new reactions that also could not be reproduced.

Of course, Sames had plenty to gain by doing so.  He was an assistant professor until his promotion in 2003, and like all young professors, he needed high-impact papers to advance his career and assist in winning grants.  When faced with the choice of slogging through the mud of the published chemistry or moving on to publish new work, Sames chose the latter.

The concerns raised to Sames went beyond the finicky nature of the reactions. The Columbia Report documents a number of instances where Sames was specifically informed of concerns with Sezen’s character.  In December 2003, a student told Sames that not only was she unable to reproduce Sezen’s work, but that Sezen was behaving oddly in that she kept changing her instructions regarding how to run the reactions.  These concerns were later echoed by another labmate who did not want to publish one of Sezen’s reactions in his paper unless he was able to reproduce it.  Sames was blind to these alarm bells—or chose to ignore them—for three full years.  Only in July 2005, when he was presented with the results of the infamous sting operation, did Sames actively move against Sezen’s misconduct.  At this point, his hand was all but forced; how could he not act? 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of all is that Sames dismissed multiple students from his lab, in part, for their inability to reproduce Sezen’s published work:

The Committee finds that Dr. Sezen’s actions had a significant impact on other researchers both within and outside Columbia University.  As discussed above, researchers made substantial and futile efforts, with consequent loss of time and expenditure of resources, to reproduce and extend Dr. Sezen’s research results.  Two graduate students, ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ were asked by ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ to leave his group at the beginning of the third year of their graduate study and one graduate student, ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ decided to leave the ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ after passing the second-year qualifying examination.   Each of these students spent much time unsuccessfully trying to reproduce and extend Dr. Sezen’s work.  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ and ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ have differing recollections as to why the students were either asked to leave or voluntarily left his group.  The students believe that their lack of success with Dr. Sezen’s chemistry was a major factor, while ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ says that other factors were determinative.  The Committee is not charged to resolve these differing recollections and opinions, but it believes that the wasted time and effort, coupled with the onus of not being able to reproduce the work, had severe negative impacts on the graduate careers of these students.

There are several reasons this section of the Columbia Report is particularly damning for Sames:

1.  Sames appears to punish several innocent students while allowing the guilty one to run wild.

2.  The action confirms that Sames knew that Sezen’s work could not be reproduced by several chemists in his own lab.

3.  The action suggests that rather than respond to the gravity of the irreproducibility and investigate it, Sames dismissed students from his lab (and in doing so, essentially silenced them).

4.  The fact that the Committee explicitly states that they were not charged with deciding whether Sames fired these students because of their inability to reproduce Sezen’s results raises a very important issue: while Sezen’s role in this scandal was investigated, we do not know whether Sames has been investigated.  Furthermore, it is noteworthy that this investigation was launched as a result of a complaint by Sames against Sezen.  Did Sames’ role as Complainant protect him from subsequent investigation?

Unfortunately, Sames negligence was not limited to Sezen’s graduate career.  Even after Sezen graduated, Sames continued to make questionable decisions:

Sames’s actions may have compromised the integrity of the investigation.  The Columbia Report notes that in the wake of the “trap” that ensnared Sezen, Sames launched his own investigation in which he and others in the lab looked through her notebooks and data that had been left behind following Sezen’s thesis defense.  Who knows what harm might have been done in this process?  Evidence might have been compromised or lost by the people not trained in proper investigative techniques.  Furthermore, when Sezen returned to the lab, she had to have known what was going on because her research materials were strewn all over the place.  When she returned, could she have disposed of evidence before anyone knew it was missing?  Sames first move in July should have been to notify the administration at Columbia so Sezen’s records (and his) would be sequestered.  Unfortunately, this did not occur until April 2006, a fact lamented by the investigatory committee.

Sames published correction notes under Sezen’s name without her permission.  Sames published addition/correction notices in JACS on 1 March 2006 to retract two papers and correct a third.  These corrections notes are published with Sezen as the first author, however, there is solid evidence that Sezen had nothing to do with writing them as: (i) she insisted publically her results were solid, (ii) a footnote in the Columbia Report says Sames only notified Sezen of the retractions on 26 March 2006, and (iii) following publication of the retractions, JACS altered the original wording to reflect that they were being made by the corresponding author. 

We know how Sezen has been punished, but what of Sames?  Sezen is (rightly) going to lose her Ph.D. because it was based on fabricated data.  Can Sames keep his job given his gross record of sustained negligence and the fact that a portion of Sezen’s work almost certainly factored in to Columbia’s decision to award him tenure in 2003?

The answer is yes, apparently, because it has been six years since Sezen was exposed and Sames doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.  While we don’t know how Columbia has punished Sames—if at all—we do know several punishments Sames has escaped.  He still has his job at Columbia.  He still has tenure.  He still is allowed to run his own research lab.  He still receives federal funding.  He is still allowed to publish in JACS and seemingly was never suspended from doing so.  Finally, he has evaded the vast majority of the acrimony surrounding the case.  Somewhere between 2005 and 2011, the beautiful work of Sames became the horrible work of Sezen.  How is it that a professor can be given the lionshare of credit for a body of good work when published, yet escape the lionshare of the blame when the work is proven fraudulent?

It is interesting to note that on 3 February 2006—right in the middle of the Sezen investigation—Columbia’s faculty altered its policy on scientific misconduct.  In this change, the following passage was completely deleted from the old policy:

III. Research

A climate must be maintained at the University where creativity and productivity in research are promoted in an atmosphere of high ethical standards. It is essential that the integrity of research be maintained at all times, since long-standing, often irreversible damage can result from breach of academic commitment to truth in investigative activities. Misconduct in research is herein defined as gross lack of integrity in conducting basic or clinical investigations involving dishonesty, knowing misrepresentation of data, and/or violation of accepted standards. Academic misconduct or fraud can destroy public trust in the academic community as a whole and in our own institution in particular; it can shatter individual careers; it can undermine sensitive relationships between investigators, students, and the public.

In modern collaborative research, the implications of academic misconduct or fraud go far beyond the individual; they also affect collaborators whose own work has been committed to objective search for truth. The specter of guilt by association may lurk in the background for many years to come. Therefore, joint authorship requires joint responsibility; each author claiming credit for the entire work must also be aware of joint discredit. Investigators in collaborative research projects each must make reasonable and periodic inquiry as to the integrity of and processes involved in gathering and evaluating data. It should be understood that overall responsibility for the integrity of collaborative research rests with the principal investigator. Senior investigators cannot be allowed to escape the consequences of the discovery of misconduct or fraud committed under their supervision.

Every member of the faculty has a duty to respond promptly to any well-founded suspicion of academic misconduct or fraud. Allegations must be made with caution; nevertheless, the results of long-standing misconduct or fraud are so devastating that potential irregularities must be brought promptly to the attention of the proper authorities. At the same time, the rights of those whose research procedures or results are in question from the standpoint of possible falsification or adulteration must be carefully protected while a careful and fair investigation is being carried out.

That was the policy in effect throughout the entirety of Sezen’s rampage, but in 2006, a Columbia spokeswoman said that the new policy (without the wording above) would be used to investigate the case:

University spokeswoman Susan Brown noted that Sames has responsibility as senior author for the retracted papers. She also noted that he had finalized the retractions in February and that they were officially printed in the Journal on March 8.

Brown commented that the specifics of the investigation into the retractions are being kept confidential in order to facilitate the process and protect those involved.

In light of the changes to the Columbia research misconduct policy that the University Senate passed on Feb. 3 of this year, she commented that, “If misconduct is an issue … regardless of when the events happened, they will be dealt with under the new policy.” She added, however, that while the investigation into the Sames case and the revisions to the research misconduct policy overlapped in their time frame, they were completely separate events.

However, this statement stands in stark contrast to what is written in the Columbia Report on the investigation of Sezen:

Columbia University adopted its new Institutional Policy on Misconduct in Research (“Misconduct Policy”) in February, 2006.  The Misconduct Policy closely tracks the Federal Policy on Research Misconduct of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  Because the alleged misconduct occurred before the effective date of the new Misconduct Policy, the Committee applied the definition of research misconduct that was in effect when the alleged misconduct occurred…

Apparently, there is a double standard when it comes to judging students and professors.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Apparently, students should be fired for failure to replicate fictitious results, but professors are to be rewarded with tenure for being so grossly negligent as to oversee the greatest case of scientific misconduct in the history of organic chemistry.  The fact that Sames has retained his position and is still in charge of an independent research group speaks volumes about the institutional ethics of Columbia University.

Where is the justice?

In Part IV of The Sezen Files, we’ll look at some of the lessons and questions the scandal has raised about lab management and the culture of academic research:

How can scientific misconduct be prevented?

What quality control measures should be expected of advisors?

What sort of accountability should be expected of advisors?  How much negligence is the scientific community willing to accept from an advisor?  How should professors be punished for negligence?

Should taxpayers be angry about the Sames-Sezen scandal?

In July of 2005, most people would have viewed Bengu Sezen as a promising young star of organic chemistry.  She had finished her Ph.D. at Columbia in less than five years, published several high-impact papers in the hot area of C–H activation, and secured a postdoctoral position at Stanford in the laboratory of esteemed chemist Chaitan Khosla.  But Bengu Sezen’s Ph.D. defense was not just the latest mountain conquered in her ostensibly stellar career…it was the beginning of her career’s end.

Sezen began grad school in August of 2000, and by the time she was done in 2005, she had produced six first-author papers.  It had long been known within the Sames Lab—and in the world of C–H activation research—that the chemistry developed by Sezen and Sames had issues.  Chemists were having trouble reproducing the results as early as the summer of 2002.  Sames had been contacted by several groups outside Columbia who could not get the reactions to work, and inside the Sames Lab, many students were having problems launching spin-off projects.  In response to these troubles, Sames directed Sezen to provide guidance to those who made outside inquiries, and she assisted her labmates in running their reactions.  Even with Sezen’s assistance, the results were inconsistent.  The most charitable assessment of the body of work was that the reactions were finicky or “sensitive” (to the conditions).

The gravity of the situation peaked in July of 2005, when Sezen defended her thesis and was going to leave campus for good.  After her departure, the other students in the Sames Lab would be forced to fend for themselves; Sezen would no longer be present to provide assistance.  To say that the stakes for the remaining researchers were high is an understatement.  Sames had previously dismissed students from his lab, in part, for their inability to reproduce Sezen’s published, peer-reviewed work.

It was at this time that one astute labmate noticed that the reactions only produced an appreciable quantity of product when Sezen had access to the laboratory in private.  Operating on the assumption that she might have been tampering with the reactions, the labmate set up dual copies of a run-of-the-mill example of Sezen’s chemistry, the conversion of imidazole to phenylimidazole.

At least, that is what the labmate told Sezen.  What he actually did was to set up one reaction with imidazole as the starting material and the other with N-methylimidazole.  The next day, when the reactions were worked up, the product expected of (plain) imidazole was present in both flasks.  The methyl label had vanished from the other substrate…a result that could only be explained by sabotage.

The results of the “trap” were relayed to Sames, who initiated a more thorough (but informal) “in-house” investigation.  The lab poured through her notebooks (aptly named “BS-I” through “BS-XI”) and her electronic data.  It was soon discovered that these documents contained very little information that made sense.  The reactions she appeared to run were reported in *very* scant detail, which was particularly odd for reactions that were supposedly as finicky to the conditions as hers.  The last date written in her notebook was 9 June 2003. 

During the informal investigation by Sames, someone in the survey team stumbled across spectra belonging to Sezen that had been altered with White-Out.  The altered spectra had also appeared in one of Sezen’s publications.  This was the springboard for a more thorough investigation of her NMR data.

It was soon discovered that Sezen never even had her own NMR account at Columbia.  She also had not placed orders for all of the combustion/elemental analyses she reported.  She did collect some NMR spectra: she signed the log book of various instruments and appeared to use the NMR accounts of departed researchers. 

In the analysis of the accounts that Sezen is believed to have used, several series of files were discovered that essentially showed (step-by-step) how she fabricated NMR spectra for some of her compounds.  The process went as follows for her ¹H NMR spectra:  she started with a peak corresponding to methylene chloride, then to insert new peaks in her spectrum, she shifted and scaled the methylene chloride peak and added it to the parent spectrum using the instrument’s proprietary software.  Aside from the intermediate files that were found that essentially show the step-by-step process of the fabrications, a second tell-tale sign was that all of the signals had satellite peaks that corresponded to the J_CH coupling constant specific to methylene chloride of 177 Hz.  She appears to have done the same with her ³¹P NMR spectra by cutting-and-pasting a peak corresponding to triphenylphosphine.

Sames provided a draft report of his findings to Columbia in August 2005, and a formal complaint was launched against Sezen in a memorandum on 7 November 2005.  In the meantime, Sames contacted Chaitan Khosla and her postdoctoral appointment was put on hold.  The preliminary inquiry was finished on 16 February 2006, when a final report was submitted to Columbia’s Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  Sames retracted his first set of papers from JACS on 1 March 2006.

Sezen’s defense was predicated on a strategy of long periods in duck-and-cover mode (avoiding the investigation), interspersed with short bursts of attacks.  In the period following her departure from Columbia until the scandal broke publically, she generally avoided answering e-mails and Columbia did not have a physical address where it could send her documents.  Sezen appeared to hand-deliver a written letter to Columbia in January.

When the retractions were posted in March 2005, Sezen came out of hiding to make public statements to the media in emphatic defense of her work.  She also said she first learned of the retractions after they had been published—a claim that may have some degree of veracity as JACS/Sames altered the wording of the retractions later that month.

Following the public blow-up of the story, Sezen started acknowledging (to Columbia) the fact that an investigation existed.  She acknowledged receipt of the Inquiry Report on 27 March 2006.  On 19 May 2006, she provided comments on the report and (astonishingly) launched a counter-claim that alleged her accusers fraudulently claimed they could not reproduce her work in a campaign to discredit her and steal her results.

After ducking attempts by Columbia to get her to submit to an interview in the summer of 2006, that August, she contacted Science, Nature, and the New York Times with complaints about Columbia’s handling of the investigation.  She also spammed these complaints to scores of professors at the nation’s top chemistry departments.   ChemBark saw—but never reported—one such e-mail sent to a Harvard professor in 2006.

Apparently eager to get to the bottom of the story and put the investigation to rest, Columbia went out of its way to provide Sezen with materials to review regarding the investigation.  It even retained the services of a law firm in Europe to provide a place for her to receive and review thousands of pages of documents.  Eventually, after several on-again/off-again cycles of interacting with the investigation committee—she claimed visa issues prevented her from returning to New York and she repeatedly called off telephone interviews—Sezen submitted to a telephone interview on 6 October 2006.

It is unclear when, exactly, Sezen mounted the defenses listed below, but her story included:

She denied that she had enrolled in a (second) Ph.D. program at the University of Heidelberg, then later recanted this denial.

She denied ever using the NMR accounts of departed researchers at Columbia.  She claimed her NMR account had the user name “bengu”.  The NMR facility manager reported no such account ever existed.

Regarding the missing data for her experiments, she claimed to maintain a supplementary set of notebooks with the details of her procedures.  (Who knows what information she thought worthy of putting in her eleven “real” notebooks?)  Similarly, she had supplementary binders of spectra that were not in Columbia’s possession.

She claimed that a company named “Duha Chemisches Katalyse-Labor” (a.k.a. “Duha”) successfully reproduced her work.  An official at the company named Ralf Decter sent Columbia an electronic message to verify Sezen’s claim.  The problem…the IP address of the computer that sent the message traced to the University of Heidelberg (where Sezen was studying in 2006).  An official at Duha (perhaps also Decter…the name was redacted) also sent a written letter to Columbia.  Columbia contacted the business located at the address on the Duha letterhead, and the person who responded said that he neither knew of Ralf Decter nor a company named “Duha”.  These entities were adjudged by the investigation committee to be fictitious.

Similarly, in what was perhaps an attempt to scare Columbia, Sezen claimed in January 2006 she had retained the services of a lawyer named M. Atkas.  M. Atkas wrote a memo to Columbia in February 2006.  Columbia could not contact Mr. Atkas and a search revealed no lawyer by that name (or his business, “Barrington Law Firm”) to exist.

Sezen claimed that purchase requisitions did not exist for many of her combustion analyses because she obtained them in free trials.  Columbia could find no vendors who offered free trials for elemental analyses.

Unsurprisingly, the full investigation by Columbia found Sezen’s defenses not to be credible.  Its final report enumerated many specific instances of plagiarism and fabrication (mainly spectra and elemental analyses) in great detail.  This report formed the basis of a similar report tied to the investigation of Sezen by the Office of Research Integrity.  In November 2010, the ORI cited 21 specific instances of misconduct in suspending Sezen from receiving federal funding for five years.  While Columbia stated last year it was moving to revoke her degree, it is unclear whether this has happened.

Up Next… The Sezen Files, Part III: And What of Sames?

The Columbia Report verifies ChemBark’s long-held claims that Professor Dalibor Sames dismissed students from his lab for failure to reproduce Sezen’s fraudulent work.  How has Sames managed to escape the fire?   

I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and it was truly excellent.  Perhaps the thing that I found most interesting from the film was an entry that expedition leader Merriweather Lewis made in his journal on the occasion of his 31st birthday:

This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

I turned 31 this month, and over the course of the past year, I’ve felt many of the same sentiments as Lewis.  If I dropped dead tomorrow, there is no question in my mind that I would have had a net negative impact on the world.  I’ve essentially been in school for my entire life, chewing through a variety of taxpayer money in the form of (free) public education, competitive scholarships & fellowships, and grant money.  There’s also the many man-hours of time I’ve sapped from the workforce by way of the training provided by my parents, teachers, and mentors.  In contrast, my contributions to the world (e.g., teaching and a smattering of research papers) have been fairly insignificant.  My body of published research has little chance of helping anyone besides, perhaps, a couple of random souls in the future who are (more than likely) also working on projects of little importance to society at large.

Perhaps this waste and my unease can be written off as unavoidable costs of growing up, but the funny thing is that—unless one actively puts his mind to doing so—it seems pretty difficult to break out of such a cycle.  I mean, look around you.  How much of academic research truly excites you?  What percentage of papers in today’s journals will be especially helpful for more than twenty people, ever?  How many will go completely uncited—or even unread?  Is this what you want to spend your life doing?

I’ve asked this question before, but I’ll ask it again:  What is the greatest achievement in chemistry of the past 10 years?  20 years?  30 years?  Genome sequencing techniques, maybe?  Gleevec?  If that’s all we can bring to the table over such a long period, we’re in trouble.  Lack of production—not in terms of insipid papers, but in terms of compelling advances that benefit society—is going to make it increasingly difficult to justify our current level of taxpayer funding.  If steep budget cuts can happen to NASA’s human spaceflight program, they sure as hell can happen to chemistry.  We’ll probably find this out if we keep spinning our wheels.

Is there hope on the horizon?  I don’t know.  It seems like most of the cattle coming out of the barn are heading right down the same path as those before them.  Many areas of modern research have been tapped almost dry scientifically, but people continue to line up to fight over the scraps.  The academic system of chemistry has become some weird game where there are all of these expectations of what you should be doing.  These expectations keep people busy doing a whole lot of nothing, like publishing a bunch of boring/worthless papers to get more money so they can publish more boring/worthless papers.

What is the point of getting an academic job—or any job in research, for that matter—if you are not going to work on problems that stand to provide significant benefits to mankind?  Part of me understands why washed up professors continue to work on overfarmed land—they were there first.  What I can’t understand is how freshly minted assistant professors can start out working on crap projects.  Why bother?  I assume it’s simply because these people want the status of being a professor, so perhaps hiring committees are to blame?

Or maybe it’s the funding agencies?  I am not advocating cutting back on the funding of scientific research, but you can count me among the people who believe that we need to modify the way we fund this research.  I’d like to see fewer people rewarded for “playing the game” and producing a whole lot of insipid garbage rather than those who have got bold new ideas, even if they are associated with decreased chances of “success”.

Industry has its own problems.  Pharma is neck-deep in an area of diminishing returns for how it discovers drugs, and the industry is shedding weight like a cancer patient.  Of course, not everyone seems to care.  Grad students continue to pile into total synthesis labs, and our flagship news weekly runs pieces titled “Chemistry: Alive and Well”.  Chemistry is alive, but is it really well? 

I’m not as concerned that we’re in the doldrums as I am that no one seems especially motivated to get out.  But who am I kidding?  I’m sure as hell not going to change the broken system.  People have been saying things like “pharma is broken” and “total synthesis is dead” for years, but nothing has stopped their slow march into oblivion.  The only thing I can control is what I do, and I’d prefer not to spend the rest of my life polishing turds.

Getting back to Merriweather Lewis…the Corps of Discovery’s expedition would go down in history as one of the greatest feats of human exploration and of immense national importance to his fledgling country.  In taking such a grand risk, Lewis unquestionably achieved his goal of “advanc[ing] the information of the succeeding generation”.  Unfortunately, he never reached his predicted lifespan of 62.  Rather, Lewis put a bullet in his head at the ripe old age of 35.

There is a virtual conference on “The Future of Women in Chemistry and Science” today at 11 am (EST). You can watch it here.

Some big names will be speaking, including ACS president Nancy Jackson, ACS executive director Madeleine Jacobs, Caltech prof Jackie Barton, MIT prof Milly Dresselhaus, Wisconsin prof Laura Kiessling, Carbon-Based Curiosities blogger Jes Sherman, and origin-of-life superstar Felisa Wolfe-Simon.

Depending on what is said, I may just decide to grab the third-rail of scientific politics and write a follow up post later this week.