this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Anedotally this is why I didn't like bio, none of the labs really ever worked and we always fudged some data.
The results of my master's thesis were used for two papers in Nature Communications. So much of the data was fudged and I was either asked to leave out data points, sets of data that didn't fit the hypothesis, or I was looking how my supervisor just deleted numbers until it looked good. I was so incredibly embarrassed and angry. I declined the offer to do a PhD under the same supervisor. Oral gavage yourself with your dick my dude.
I knew drug company scientists who didn't trust anything in academia for this reason. The incentives were aligned on the wrong side of dishonesty. If stuff didn't work out in pharma you just moved on to the next idea.
That's an interesting take. I worked in a pharma startup once and they were grinding cutthroat bitches, but yeah, they were very focused on what they wanted to achieve. The most unethical thing - apart from absolutely ignoring human decency and worker's rights - was probably exploiting funding for Covid research for cancer research. To be fair tho, it was the early days of Covid and their initial cancer target was structurally similar to a molecule in sars cov 2. And the CEO slept like 3 hours a day and was always one of the first ones to turn in applications for some funding contest, which is why he often got them. You have to get the money for your work somehow. And we did use the money for the development of the covid drug, it is just that we also used it to run the same tests and get equipment/reagents for the cancer targets.