My best friend went to UCSD for his PhD in biology. He was brilliant and had a nearly unique depth of insight into knotty problems and an incredible drive to progress the field. Unfortunately he was also a bit of an idealist with little real political sense.
In grad school he selected a difficult problem in the cancer space and worked on it in the lab for 6 years. His advisor thought he was on track for a Nature paper. Around the end of year 6 a very famous scientist who was on his larger committee decided he wanted the research for himself (apparently). He had one of his floater grad students (in their last years of grad school without any research of their own to publish) literally steal his data from his desk. They eventually published their ‘stolen’ paper in Nature themselves, before my friend could have finished writing it up by himself.
My friend found he was unable to compete with the reputation of this scientist and was repeatedly told to just move on - even his own advisor suggested that there was nothing to do about it and complaining to the university ethics committee would only hurt his career. He tried anyway, entirely unsuccessfully.
My friend was not able to move on. He left grad school with an exit Masters. He spent a few years in his parents house lost, then in institution really really lost. He eventually got himself together and built up the courage to try again (roughly 10 years later). He got into a good bioinformatics program on the opposite coast of the country. Eventually the same exact thing started happening to him again. Things got bad. I left work early one day to go cheer him up and long story short I found his body in the bathtub of his apartment. He was just not ready to go through it all again.
I still think about him every single day more than a year out from his funeral. I find myself unable to understand why some humans treat each other the way that they do or how they are able to get away with it. I’ve asked around and it seems like this is a fairly common occurrence, especially in circles around the original ‘famous’ scientist. These people basically killed my friend, don’t know it and probably wouldn’t care. They likely rationalize their behavior as the cost of doing science.
The system is absolutely disgustingly broken and much of published and celebrated science is, in one way or another, a lie. We need to stop making scientists into rockstars, especially those who somehow publish more papers in a year than physically possible. Each one of these untouchable individuals is followed by an unseen trail of ruined careers and ruined lives.
The field would not have suffered. My friend’s work would still have been published. The difference is that it wouldn’t have added to the myth of exceptionalism of this particular scientist - and maybe the floater grad student would not have gotten her PhD... but in the end my friend didn’t get his PhD either and now he isn’t here any more. Scientific prestige is not a limited resource and should not be subject to the tragedy of the commons.
My young daughter asks about him a lot and I have no idea what to say.