How to steal scientific ideas.

Science is a business of ideas. By its very definition, researchers are required to generate new ideas. However, the ideas do not pop up in vacuum. Astute researchers have to master the literature, learn where the gaps in the current field of research exist and then find a feasible way to fill those gaps.

The way the current research training is done, the majority of researchers eventually become rigid in their ideas. Their research becomes dull and boring. In the name of ‘detailed study’ they keep burrowing deeper into descriptive research. Years of battles with paper publications, failed grant applications and stress of obtaining tenure and load of teaching wears them out. Only few remain as enthusiastic as they were in the beginnings of their career. Of those who remain enthusiastic, most are not driven by scientific inquiry but by the social and political thrill of it.

Surviving on the stolen ideas of trainees and postdocs becomes a viable means of their academic lives. But they have to do it in a sophisticated way. Here are a few simple ways to do it:

1. ‘Encourage’ every trainee applicant to write a 2 page mock research proposal. This is a shotgun approach whereby anyone showing an interest in your research can be asked to provide idea of what to do. You then take those ideas and adopt them in your current research.

2. Group discussions/brain storming in lab. Pretend that you are helping people bring out their best. Make them bust their ass to beat each other’s ideas and then pick all the good ones as your own.

3. Once the trainee presents a great idea with some interesting preliminary data, kill his/her enthusiasm by saying that the idea is useless, not relevant, premature, too complex for the current state of science etc. During the next few months, gently incorporate the idea in your casual talks. Finally, give the project to someone other than the originator of the idea as your own.

4.  Make your trainees write a fellowship proposal. Incorporate those questions as an aim in your own grant. Pretend that it was all your own to begin with.

There are many more subtle ways you can steal the idea of your trainees to call your own. With the years of toiling under your own mentor, you have consciously or unconsciously picked up techniques to put down your colleagues and steal intellectual property. Now it is your turn to perpetuate it. Do it with style, do it with authority and when challenged, you can always say that all data and ideas belong to NIH or the institution. You only happen to be an agent of theft (read hired thief).

There are other better ways as you climb up the ladder of your academic career. You can steal from other labs by being a reviewer. Oh, don’t give me the shit about ethics and confidentiality. You know what I mean.

If everything else fails, you can also resort to saying that ideas are not novel it is the ability to materialize them matters.

Lawyers are universally loathed for their ability to fudge the truth. In reality, scientists can be worse than lawyers. They wear the cloak of honesty and objectivity, but the unscrupulous ones are constantly twisting the truth, presenting half-truth, and backstabbing with hidden dagger of greed and deception.