Over My Dead Body - Dr. Paul Kim, Comp & Math Sci.

During my post-doctoral training at LSU Health Sciences Center-Shreveport, which is one of two medical schools in Louisiana, I was required to attend a mandatory training session before beginning my research work. Presided by a renowned researcher at LSU-HSC, this seminar gave me a strong impression how important it is to have a research in a right direction. I forgot about the most of his presentation, but I could never forgot one thing: “over my dead body.” I never heard that phrase before. It was more shocking than when my boss used swearing and cussing words in the lab at times. Perhaps, this researcher had already gone through the difficulties with the issue of research integrity. Or he wanted to emphasize its gravity. Whatever reasons it might have been, his fiery character and passion overtook me for a long period of time. As many people say, researchers could either “publish” or “perish.” So the pressure to generating good results is quite understandable. With some medical doctors and many PhDs attending the training session, slightly compromising the results (like remove one outlier from the actual datasets) would give us a completely different scenario. Truly “over my dead body” was the right expression that he properly used so that we might be determined to fight against such temptations. Think about what happened to the youngest female billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. Her exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the blood-testing technology was good enough to recruit a ton of investors. However, it did not last long and her net worth is said to zero dollars from $9 billion. A small compromise in the research results probably was the beginning point of a deadly consequence. In that regard, “over my dead body” has made a perfect sense. In either case, somebody should be dead: you or me if you are involved in the research.