The Best Way To Blow the Whistle

bmahersciwriter writes "Helene Hill thought she was close to retirement when, on a whim one day, she decided to check on a junior colleague's cell cultures. They were empty, she says, yet he produced data from them soon after. Blowing the whistle on what she thinks was research misconduct cost her 14 years and $200,000. See how she and other whistleblowers fared in this story from Nature."

Comments

Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[Taco Cowboy]

Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.

Honesty is no longer treasured.

No matter if it's Helen Hill or Edward Snowden, as long as you blew the whistle on wrongdoings of others, you will get punished.

The world we live in is becoming more and more fake.

Lies worth much more than truth.

Fakeries work much better than honesty.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[BringsApples]

Liars only ever trust other liars. To a liar, people that only tell the truth are a burden, and they feel that those people need to stay the fuck out of other people's business.

Likewise, people that tell the truth only ever like people that tell the truth. They feel that the others are fucking up the world for their own temporary benefit.

This is probably a fundamental reason behind 'to what degree' whistle-blowers suffer in the world.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[Lucky_Pierre]

Corporate world? Hardly. The story is about the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.......that's in the "academic world" .......that beacon of intellectual honesty and moral superiority we're all supposed to bow down to.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[ebno-10db]

I see you're already up to +5 (for good reason).

What many would see as the surprising, or questionable, notion, is that liars only trust other liars. What it is though is only trusting people who play by the same set of rules as you, and it's irrelevant that the rules are crooked. Only trust your own kind. Another liar may be your enemy, but at least you understand him. Liars always try to act in their own self-interest, but those honest people are unpredictable, and their motives difficult to understand. How can you trust someone you can't understand, and hence whose behavior is totally unpredictable? It's like being with someone who most of the time is perfectly reasonable, but at unpredictable moments flies into wild irrational rages, screaming about demons seen only by them, like "ethics" and "truthfulness".

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.

Honesty is no longer treasured.

"Has become"? "No longer"? Look, whistleblowers have always been treated badly. Governmental, corporate, academic--no matter what kind of organization you're in, the organization will react badly to anything it sees as a threat. And the problem gets worse the larger the organizations are. In small groups, human beings act like human beings, but in large groups, they act more like the cells of some vast organism. Imagine how you'd react if some of your muscle cells suddenly started refusing to contract when you told them to, even if by that refusal they were preventing you from doing something you really shouldn't do.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[0123456]

There are editorials going back more than a century saying the exact same things you are saying. It's all going to hell, blah blah blah.

And they were right. A century ago we were heading into WWI, WWII and the Cold War under perpetual threat of nuclear destruction, where we avoided destroying life on Earth as much by luck as intelligence.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they have. It is considered a significant and important achievement in a child's development when it starts lying, because lying shows that the child understands that other people have different knowledge about the world. Before a child understands this, there's no point in lying: If you believe that everybody knows the same, why tell something that isn't true? The others know it isn't true, right? So lying is an indication that a child has established itself as an individual with different experiences and knowledge. The first step is just to realize that lying is possible. The second step is to learn to lie convincingly. The latter requires insight into the realm of experience and knowledge of the person being lied to. People who always tell the truth may be doing so because they never learned to lie convincingly, so they got caught most of time and stopped doing it.

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[weilawei]

While politeness may be a useful social lubricant, engendering mental dichotomy on such a scale is simply begging for errors in communication. Perhaps it has "always" been that way, but must it be?

Re:Honesty is never treasured in corporate world

[ultranova]

Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.

Well, a corporation is like a miniature communist dystopia (or Soviet-style communist countries are modeled after corporations, whichever one you prefer), complete with internal police, hilariously untrue propaganda, purges, ass-covering, ideologically driven directives, low efficiency that gets hidden by creative reporting or outright lying, etc. Pretty much the only difference is that you get a boot rather than a bullet when it's time to leave. Unless you pissed someone off and they want to make an example of you, in which case things like the summary happen.

You can't really expect rational behaviour from such an absurd setup, so don't take it so seriously. Sit back, enjoy the farce, and if you want to expose something, make sure the leak can't be traced back to you.

Hmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

From the slashdot entry at the top: "Blowing the whistle on what she thinks was research misconduct cost her 14 years..."

From the linked article: "Hill would spend the next 14 years trying to expose what she believes to be a case of scientific misconduct. "

Reading the slashdot entry, I thought that she went to jail for 14 years, which she didn't. :)

from what i seen how whistleblowers are treated

[FudRucker]

i would most definitely blow the whistle anonymously, maybe post on some forums and upload videos from a public library or public wifi hotspot while using fake names for signing on anywhere

Re:Misleading Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite frankly, that's not whistleblowing, that's an obsession. She even almost admits it. There is a desire for truth, but when you've gathered all the information and the world still doesn't want to hear it, let it go. If you've blown the whistle and everybody tells you to keep the noise down, it's not your fault. At that point, just make sure anybody who looks for the paper also finds the damning analysis, then move on.

Re:Misleading Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much she had to pay slashdot or dice.com to get this story posted....

Ya but this doesn't look like a case of it

[Sycraft-fu]

So she said "This data is faked!" the university looked in to it, they have committees for that kind of thing as I'm sure you know, and said that no, they could find no evidence of wrongdoing. So she got the federal Office of Research Integrity involved, they looked in to it, and said "Nope we see no evidence of wrongdoing here." So she took it to court, and lost the case, appealed it, and lost that case.

This would seem to be a case where she's wrong. She thought she saw misconduct, but she was incorrect, but she's pushing this anyhow.

Remember that just because scientific misconduct happens does not mean all accusations of misconduct are true.

Re:Take a deep breath

[Kardos]

Yeah sure. How many tenured profs who notice misconduct are going to walk away from their post?

Re:Duh

[Z00L00K]

It doesn't matter which kind of business you are in if you blow the whistle - you will get beaten harder than the offender.

There are other ways - anonymous leaks to the top brass, press and authorities, "accidents" causing "essential" material to disappear or be destroyed. (oops, I accidentally dropped your PC out the window... Or just a "mix-up" of PC:s at the workplace) At worst a fire cleansing.

Or you just STFU.

When I teach my child about why she shouldn't lie,

[Anonymous Coward]

what I tell her is this:

Yes, when you lie, your peers will punish you when they find out. But that's not the real issue.

When you're a liar, you're projecting a false self as a problem solving tool. This forces you to keep multiple versions of reality in your head.

Carried systematically across a lifetime, this will cause you to become a person made up of many people, none of whom are you.

Eventually, you will not know who you are, or what you believe, and when you meet a strong person with integrity, you will be unable to hold a form of your own in their presence.

This is a road to hell on earth, a hell contained within ones own mind, where the wind can blow your identity to and fro at a moments notice, and you live in a constant state of fearful reactionary adjustment of self.

What it all boils down to is this: people are not worth lying to.

http://experiencelife.com/article/walking-your-talk-the-path-of-personal-integrity/

http://melodylovesthis.com/parentingohyes/kids-and-lying-why-truth-matters/

Re:Duh

[Charliemopps]

No, you have to do it right. She went in and made a stink, made the entire affair about her. That's the WRONG way to do it. I've had to rat some people out in my profession before, and my approach is always the same. Gather clear and obvious evidence. Take it to which-ever superior you think is clever enough to understand it. Then play dumb as a rock... "I ran across this while doing some work... I really don't get what it means. Why would be do this or this? It seems like he intentionally did it but I don't think he'd do that!" then your desire to remain out of the subject, anonymous.

You've now given the superior permission to take full credit for the discovery. Instead of it looking like YOU are on a witch hunt and personally dislike the target, it's now your bosses show. If they don't follow through or fail in some miserable fashion, you can review their failure or reason for rejecting the idea, refine your approach and go to another superior with new data. Sometimes you don't have enough evidence. That's fine, bad people like to repeat their offenses. Sit and wait and it will happen again, this time you can be ready and collect more data.

Granted, I'm in IS. So most of my Whistle blowing involves security breaches by upper management, who think security is for us Peons... or rolling out projects with no testing... that sort of thing. So it's in the companies best interest to correct the issue immediately. I've gotten several people in much higher pay scales than I fired and I doubt more than a couple of people in the whole company have any idea I was involved.

I can't reiterate enough how important it is to remain anonymous. Even if you're successful, you don't want to be "that guy" at work that everyone knows is out to get everyone. Stay quiet, let others take the glory. This kind of glory is tainted, you don't want it.