A few years before I joined a laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for my postdoctoral training, I recall reading about a frightening incident of radioactive phosphorus-32 (P-32) poisoning on that campus. In this bizarre case, a married couple who were postdoctoral fellows working together in the same lab accused their mentor – the principal investigator (PI) of the lab – of poisoning the female postdoc by lacing her lunch with P-32. Why? The allegation was that the PI was unhappy that the pregnancy of his postdoc would slow down her progress at work – and of course, the PI’s progress en route to a scientific patent.
Ultimately, after a thorough investigation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the PI was cleared of any wrongdoing. Although suspicion shifted to the postdoc’s husband for a variety of reasons, there was insufficient evidence to indict him.
I have always been intrigued by the touchy relationship between the mentor – someone with the power to make or break a PhD student’s career – and the student, who is entirely dependent on the mentor for success and a positive experience in the lab. I have been in the shoes of an undergraduate researcher, Masters student, PhD student, postdoc, and all ranks of academic PI positions, including the chair of our departmental graduate committee. So believe me when I say that I’ve seen just about every kind of issue crop up. Well, except for P-32 poisoning.
Armed with experience from all stages of my career in science, I wrote A Degree of Betrayal, a novel, to highlight the complexities of the PI-student relationship. Indeed, such a relationship is often further complicated by gender issues – typically a female student who is subordinate to a male PI. Although both my Masters and PhD mentors were women, the former combination is still more common, because there are still more male PIs, while – at least in our institute – the majority of graduate students are female.
With more women subordinate to men in research labs, in the course of my career I have come across actual cases of sexual harassment by the PI, as reported to me by fellow students. But the goal of A Degree of Betrayal was to address a subtler and more difficult form of betrayal by a mentor. In a position of power, an abusive mentor can find many ways to inflict harm on a student who does not satisfy his (or her) demands in the lab – whether they are legitimate demands or not. Such punishment includes an unwillingness to support the student’s research, failure to provide recommendation letters (in a timely manner), general lack of fairness in deciding when a student is ready to graduate, and so on. As many of these issues are highly subjective and often debatable, proving such allegations is an extremely difficult enterprise.
Like my first two novels, Matter Over Mind and Welcome Home, Sir, A Degree of Betrayal belongs to the growing genre known as “lab lit” (laboratory literature) that highlights the careers and day-to-day struggles of real-life scientists.
What options remain for a student or trainee who has been betrayed by her/his mentor? And how far would a student go to prevent such a mentor’s betrayal and protect her/his own interests? I’ll leave that to the imagination – or to those who might be interested in reading A Degree of Betrayal.
A Degree of Betrayal: the relationship between PhD students and mentors | Steve Caplan
