So these Boeing whistleblowers dying brings back the harsh reminder of the realities of whistleblowing.
My husband was just about to wrap up his PhD — a novel method for imaging that would have applications like detecting arthritis early enough…to reverse it. 🧵
He discovers that there’s academic fraud going on when a researcher on a committee claims to have found a novel way to have done something…only she’s describing my husband’s research.
This is a huge no-no. The committee members are supposed to vet viability of ideas, and explicitly instructed not to claim these ideas as their own.
Also, imagine how pissed off his OWN professor was. Like she was ultimately going to get the credit for this because he’s in her lab.
So my husband, pissed off AF (obvs) starts digging in and all of this person’s research unravels because she doesn’t understand the underlying tech of photoshop and/or PowerPoint.
Dude there is XML-based history that shows the supposedly novel imaging files being tampered with. 🤦♀️
So not only has he passed all of his written and oral exams, had a paper published in Nature (IYKYK) and is a semester away from graduation, just finishing his written dissertation.
He even still has the letter from the Chancellor of the university, saying “you’ve been approved for your doctorate and congratulations, etc”
All the years of graduate study student loans, all the years of me supporting us so he can do this really significant thing for science and the health of humans, all of it comes to nothing.
He gets managed out and the research hospital re-orgs so it all just goes away and donors will never know.
Oh and the person who made millions throughout a career of faking research turns out to have been bullying most of the graduate and post-doc researchers in their lab, threatening to send them back to China if they don’t do what they are told to do.
So my husband is forced out because his job isn’t forensic whistleblowing it’s research and he’s failing to produce but ffs of course he is, he had this amazing idea and this fuckwad was incredibly blatant about stealing his very specific work and calling it their own.
And he absolutely did the right thing because FFS we are fucked forever as humans if we cannot trust and verify scientific research that impacts human health. I mean really.
Then COVID hits and thankfully I’m a reasonable breadwinner and over the course of us all being locked up inside, I teach him what I know about building accessible things for the web and also as a classically trained engineer he picks it up so fast.
Now today he understands web fundamentals (esp accessibility), frameworks, and even teaches ME stuff about TypeScript.
I hate the world on days when I have to remember what happened to him. I hate that I have to be grateful that he is still alive despite doing the ethical thing. That’s not a sentence that anyone should have to say.
I feel like he should have been at least comped for his student loans. Like “lol no whistleblowers go down sorry but we will erase the financial burden of your past so you can just quietly go do something else with your life.”
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he’d told more people his story.
I have to imagine there would have been some outrage even if it’s just the UNC student newspaper 🤷♀️
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