At Major University, science faculty are expected to develop—and secure outside funding for— research projects in their area of specialization. A junior faculty member has received a prestigious new investigator grant that enables her to support a graduate student as well as a part-time technician. The graduate student whom she is supporting to work on this project is both excited about the research, and highly skilled in the laboratory, so the work is going quickly. On the basis of the student’s first six months of work on this grant, as well as earlier studies she conducted on her own, the faculty member is preparing to submit a major grant proposal. As part of the proposal, the faculty member needs to provide extensive preliminary data to support her hypothesis and approach. She has therefore asked the graduate student for his raw data, along with the general conclusions that he has drawn from his work so far.
With the proposal deadline looming, the faculty member takes the graduate student’s research materials home to read over the weekend. As she reviews his work, she realizes that some of it has serious flaws. For one experiment he failed to include a critical control; in another, he excluded from the analysis some data points that he labeled as "outliers." The student’s conclusions based on his experiments are now in question, but they are crucial for the grant proposal. The faculty member agonizes over how to proceed.
On Monday morning the faculty member informs the graduate student of her concerns. She tells him that he needs to repeat several of the key experiments, using appropriate protocols, and that the work must be completed this week so that results can be included in the grant proposal. The graduate student then tells her that he had planned to take part of the week off to attend a family reunion, but the faculty member is adamant that he remain to carry out the required studies. The graduate student storms out of the lab; the faculty member returns to her office to consider her options.