Yao Xuebiao’s character controversy

This incident may not be famous, but it is definitely a rare, strange and bizarre incident worthy of leaving a mark in history. The strange thing is that this bizarre story that happened in an American university has never aroused the interest of the American media (I only found one local newspaper that reported it). Fortunately, the court verdict introduced the cause and effect of the incident in detail, leaving a record for history. The following introduction is based on the judgment.

The protagonist of the story is the Chinese biologist Yao Xuebiao. He graduated from Jiangxi Medical College in 1985, went to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, and received his PhD in molecular biology in 1995. After graduation, he engaged in postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego. In February 1998, Yao Xuebiao worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (hereinafter referred to as UW).

The story happened in the second half of 1998, shortly after Yao Xuebiao arrived at UW. At that time, Edwin Chapman, another assistant professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was using bacteria to produce recombinant proteins, but accidents continued to occur. On several occasions, the temperature of the equipment they used was adjusted very high by someone unknown, so high that it would damage the experimental materials. On other occasions, bleach and salt were poured into the petri dish, causing the sample to lose its activity. On other occasions, they discovered that the labels on test tubes and flasks had been swapped. They suspected that someone was deliberately sabotaging the test tubes and flasks by putting codes on them, and it turned out that someone was indeed secretly changing the labels on them.

Chapman initially suspected that someone in his lab was responsible, and once even confronted one of his researchers about it. Chapman reported the vandalism to his department chair and the school police department and provided a list of three suspects. In order to find out who was responsible for the sabotage, the police department assisted Chapman in secretly installing two cameras in late November. One is installed in the corridor, and the other is installed in a public instrument room, where an oscillator is placed. The oscillator is an instrument used to cultivate bacteria. It can maintain a constant temperature and keep shaking, so that the bacterial culture liquid in the test tube or flask can be mixed evenly, which is helpful for the growth of bacteria. Because Chapman was The laboratory is using bacteria to produce proteins, so this shaker is often used. Part of the money to buy this machine came from the founding fund of the Yao Xuebiao Laboratory across the street, and part of it came from the department's private fund. Although it was labeled "Yao Laboratory", it was shared by the two laboratories.

On December 5, 1998 (Saturday), Chapman viewed a videotape captured by a camera in the instrument room. This videotape records the situation from noon on the 4th to noon on the 5th. The videotape shows: Between 4 and 6 pm on the 4th, three of Chapman's students placed some test tubes on the shaker to prepare the bacteria inside to grow overnight. After 7 o'clock, Yao Xuebiao appeared in the instrument room, picked up the two test tubes that Chapman's students had placed on the oscillator, looked at them and put them back, but it was unclear from the videotape what he was doing. At 6 a.m. on the 5th, a Chapman student came to the instrument room and took away the test tubes (he later testified that he went to the laboratory to transfer the bacteria in the test tubes to flasks for continued cultivation), and then took four The large flask comes back and is placed on the shaker. Chapman did not finish watching the tape. He was curious about what Yao Xuebiao was doing, and decided to keep the videotape for future study. Since each camera only had two videotapes for rotation, on the second day (the 6th), after another videotape in the instrument room was finished shooting, Chapman did not check the content of the video and asked it to go back and shoot again, resulting in There was no record for the period after noon on the 5th.

On the 7th (Monday), Chapman checked the video tape from the 4th to 5th again. After watching it for a while, he couldn't find anything special and felt that there was no need to keep it. It was loaded into the camera for filming around 5 p.m. About an hour later, Chapman's students came to report to him the test results of using bacteria to produce proteins: Someone had sabotaged it again. Two strains that produced different proteins in different flasks were mixed together, so they did not get two strains separately. It is not a protein but a mixture of two proteins and cannot be used in experiments. Chapman realized that the later parts of the tape from the 4th to 5th that he had not watched must have recorded the destruction, and immediately took it off the camera to view it. Sure enough, the video showed that between 8 and 9 a.m. on the 5th, Yao came to the instrument room again and did some operations on the test tubes and bacterial culture fluid in the flasks of Puchaman students: put a The bacteria in the test tube were mixed with the bacteria in a flask, and then the bacteria in the two flasks were mixed.

Accordingly, Chapman reported to the department chair that Yao Xuebiao had sabotaged his experimental work. The police subsequently arrested Yao and Yao was interrogated. Although Yao was not later charged with a crime, the school initiated proceedings to expel Yao. In December 1999, the UW Faculty Rights and Responsibilities Committee held a five-day hearing on the case. At the hearing, the video tapes from the 4th to 5th were presented as important evidence. Chapman and his students also testified about the experimental problems encountered in their laboratory and the activities during the 4th to 5th. Yao attended the hearing accompanied by his lawyer and defended himself at the meeting.

Yao explained that he went to the instrument room to do his own experiments on the morning of the 5th. Although he admitted that there was a small possibility that he mistook the flask in Chapman's laboratory for his own flask, But he insisted that he was working on his own flask.

But he couldn't explain why there weren't any flasks on the oscillator until Chapman's students put the four flasks on it. Where did Yao's flask suddenly appear? He said that because one of his assistants was ill that day and something happened at home, he was not in a good mood and did not notice that there was no flask of his own on the oscillator. He further believed that one of Chapman's students was trying to frame him because Chapman had refused to hire the student.

Yao asked Dan Cleveland, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, to defend himself. Cleveland, who was Yao's postdoctoral advisor, testified that Yao was an "honest and upright" person. However, he admitted that if, as shown on the video tape, Yao was operating someone else's experimental samples without authorization, then there would be cause for concern. But he also believed that Yao would not have been able to obtain the test results obtained by Chapman's students if he had just mixed different culture solutions. Chapman countered that if Yao had not only done the mixing but also switched the labels on the flasks (Yao briefly walked away from the camera with the flask before doing the mixing), then that would have been the result.

The "Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities" unanimously believed that Yao's explanation was unreasonable, determined that Yao had intentionally undermined Chapman's experiment, and recommended that the school board expel Yao. The board of directors accordingly fired Yao Xuebiao. Yao sued the UW board of directors in Wisconsin Circuit Court, but the circuit court ruled in favor of the UW board's decision. Yao then appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. The grounds for Yao's appeal are that: 1. Chapman's videotape cannot be used as evidence because the record after the afternoon of the 5th has been lost, and this record could have been used to prove his innocence; 2. The UW board of directors ignored Yao's Testimony of an “expert witness” (i.e., Cleveland). The Court of Appeal held that:

1. Although Chapman’s videotape is incomplete, the preserved portion is sufficient to prove that Yao was engaging in sabotage;

2. Yao’s “expert witness” He is Yao's former mentor, not a neutral witness. On June 27, 2002, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals rejected Yao's appeal.

Subsequently, Yao sued Chapman and Richard Moss, chairman of the Department of Physiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for breach of trust contract. It turned out that when Yao came to teach at UW, he brought with him some hybridoma cell lines that he had created when he was a postdoctoral fellow. Cell lines must be stored in liquid nitrogen, which will gradually evaporate, so someone must regularly add liquid nitrogen to the liquid nitrogen tank. After Yao was fired, his original laboratory came under the control of Moss, and the bank of these cell lines was maintained by one of Yao's former students under Moss's supervision. In January 2001, Yao, accompanied by Moss, went to collect these cell lines and wanted to take them to the University of California, Berkeley for experiments (after Yao lost his job at the University of California, his former mentor accepted him as a visiting scholar) , only to find that all the liquid nitrogen was gone and the cell lines were all dead. It turned out that in 2000, when Moss allowed Chapman personnel to use the laboratory, a postdoc who used the liquid nitrogen tank to store his own samples may have failed to close the lid tightly, allowing the liquid nitrogen to leak out. Yao therefore sued Chapman and Moss, seeking compensation. The first instance verdict ordered Chapman and Moss to compensate Yao more than US$410,000. Chapman and Moss appealed, and the Wisconsin Court of Appeals issued a judgment on August 31, 2005, finding that Chapman and Moss were negligent when accepting the trusteeship, but they did not have any contractual relationship with Yao and there was no infringement. Therefore, the first instance judgment was overturned.

Why did Yao want to sabotage the experiments in the opposite laboratory? UW's Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities proposed several possible explanations. One possibility is that Yao was jealous of Chapman, or regarded Chapman as a potential rival (both were assistant professors at the time, and both faced the problem of being promoted to permanent professors in the future). Another possibility is that Yao believed that the oscillator belonged to him and had expressed dissatisfaction with others about the use of "his" oscillator in Chapman's laboratory, thus retaliating. In addition, the committee also noted that Yao was under various pressures at work and at home, which may have affected his mental health. Unless the perpetrators themselves confess, the motives of many academic misconduct incidents are difficult to identify, and there is no need to identify them because they are not understandable to ordinary people.

Another bizarre aspect of this incident is that after Yao was expelled from the UW, his reputation was not ruined. Instead, he flourished in the Chinese academic world: he was selected into the first batch of the Ministry of Education's "Yangtze River Plan" and served as a professor of science and technology in China. Distinguished professor of the School of Life Sciences of the University, received the China National Outstanding Youth Fund, presided over major innovation projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, served as the leader of the 863 project of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and served as the chief scientist of the 973 project of the Ministry of Science and Technology... He actually stayed in the United States most of the time, first working in other I am a visiting scholar there as a graduate tutor.