As a graduate student, Cather Simpson is excited to present her work -- but then her adviser lies about it.

When Cather Simpson graduated from high-school in the USA, she was certain she was going to become a neurosurgeon. She was very, very wrong. In her first year at uni, she got discovered scientific research and got completely hooked. She is now a Professor of Physics and Chemical Sciences at the University of Auckland, where she runs a super-fun laser lab called the Photon Factory. The Photon Factory uses exotic pulsed lasers to enable all New Zealand scientists accomplish their goals, from improving products for industry to helping school students with science fair projects. Working with the Photon Factory’s 25+ extraordinary physicists, chemists and engineers, Cather gets to study everything from how molecules convert light into more useful forms of energy to how to sort sperm by sex for the dairy industry. When she’s not enjoying the pleasure and satisfaction from using lasers to solve the knotty problems presented by Mother Nature, she’s doing puzzles with her partner Tom and being “Schrodinger’s Mom” – simultaneously the world’s best and worst mother – to two lovely teenage boys.

This story originally aired on Jan. 26, 2018, in an episode titled “Good and Evil”.

Story Transcript

So twenty-five years ago I had to go into hiding.  I was a student on the lam. 

So picture this.  I’m in an MD-PhD program and I’m in the research part and my project is fantastic.  I’m studying how molecules, like histamine and serotonin, get released from your immune cells when they encounter ragweed. 

One of the most amazing things about this immune system when you get an allergic reaction is that you take these round cells that are in your body and they have these finger-like microvilli on them.  Those cells flatten out and form these beautiful ruffles.  I am like dead obsessed with figuring out how the cytoskeleton, the architecture inside the cell is doing that and why on earth it would. 

Now, I've done some really hard experiments and gotten some amazing results and I’m about to head out to my very first scientific conference ever to present these as a poster.  It’s a really prestigious conference so it’s like a big win for me and it’s a major win for my PhD adviser.  I’m very excited. 

All of the biggest names in the field are going to be there.  So there's this one guy from an Ivy League school and he did some really incredible experiments on muscles.  You know, all that ratcheting motion that actinomycin does that my kids are learning about in school now. 

And another guy had taken videos of beads moving along microtubules inside of living cells.  Incredible! 

I had actually communicated with that first guy, the actinomycin guy, and he'd sent me a VHS tape.  I know. 

So I’m oscillating between like really excited and absolutely terrified, petrified.  Because, for me, this is my first chance in the big leagues and I’m dreaming about that home run.  I'd be happy with a solid single but I’m actually terrified about striking out. 

You know, best case scenario?  Professor Famous Scientist comes up and says, “Well done, Cather.  When you're ready to do your postdoc, you give me a call.”  And my career path is golden. 

Worst case, “Well, little lady, don’t you know they figured that out ten years ago?”  Yeah, devastating. 

So the big moment comes and my adviser and I head to the poster session to put up my work.  A science poster session is a bit of a scrum.  So there's like these long, long rows of corkboards and some brightly colored posters and there's well-dressed people who are standing right next to their posters.  Those are the presenters.  And everybody else at the conference is wandering around through this slightly too small, too crowded, very loud space with a plastic glass with beer or wine in it looking for some science that’s interesting enough to make them stop, and chat. 

For the presenter, it can be excruciating.  If your science is really interesting, your reward is an impromptu oral exam from somebody who’s really scary.  If it doesn’t go well, it’s horrible.  You stand there next to your poster while people walk by their eyes gliding up and down.  They avoid eye contact and walk on.  Excruciating. 

I have spent hours, weeks working on my poster.  And I've agonized, too many words, not enough words.  Too brightly colored, not colored enough.  Oh my God.  It looks like a bake sale advertisement.  And don’t forget to put Professor Ego’s name on there on your references because he will notice. 

But it pays off.  So there we are, we’re at the poster session, and our poster is absolutely surrounded.  It’s packed.  It’s really fantastic.  And we've got these big names and they're all there.  They're all there. 

But I start to notice that it’s not going quite the way I expected it to go.  So I had practiced my presentation and my elevator pitch was spot-on.  My lab mates had asked me all the really hard questions that they could think of and I could answer them without stumbling.  But I wasn’t getting to do any of that.  My adviser was holding court at my poster.  It’s not that I didn’t get to say much -- I didn’t get to say anything. 

She didn’t introduce me.  She never said, “Oh, and we have the person who did the work over here, standing right there.”  So I just stood off to the side kind of unnoticed while she basked in the glow from all of the big-name scientists out there. 

So while I’m standing there thinking, “Oh, my god.  She is so good,” and, “Wait, what am I,  chopped liver?” -- she lies. 

So Professor Superstar asks her a question and she says, “Oh, yeah.  We did that control experiment and it validates exactly what I’m telling you about here.” 

She lies to everybody.  They're just nodding and I’m standing there thinking these are the most influential, knowledgeable people about this and she just lies.  I stand there stunned. 

Then it’s like the whole poster session I can’t hear a thing.  You know, like in the movies, time slows down and there's tunnel vision like this.  And I’m not breathing. 

Just as suddenly, it all comes right back.  I take a breath, the whole cacophony of the poster session floods in, and I think to myself, “Oh, don’t be an idiot.  She didn’t lie.  That’s crazy.  She's not going to lie.  Maybe they did the experiment and you just don’t know about it yet.” 

So I don’t say anything and I don't interrupt her.  I just sort of stand there unnoticed.  But the glow is gone.  So the conference is gone from wow to weird to wrong in fifteen seconds flat.  Now, all I can think is what do I do? 

We go to dinner and she's ecstatic.  She's thinking, “What’s the next grant?  What’s the next manuscript?  What’s the next experiment we’re gonna do?”  She's just vibrating over all of the attention.  And I still don’t say anything because she's my adviser and I’m a new PhD student. 

What do I know?  I mean, who am I?  But I can’t stop thinking about it. 

So late that night, I screw up the courage and I go knock on her hotel door.  She opens the door and before I can change my mind I blurt out, “Did we do that control experiment?  Because when we tried it, it failed three times.” 

And she says, while I’m still standing in the hallway, “Oh, no.  We never got it to work, but I know what it would have said.” 

I can feel the heat come up in my face and I’m trying to control my expression because my body is reacting faster than I can.  See, I had been worried about insulting her.  Like how do I ask this question without implying that she's lying?  It had never occurred to me to come up with a response for having her just blithely admit it. 

The next morning at breakfast, I resign from the lab.  So I’m not emotional.  I don't cry.  I don't shout.  I actually go pretty flat and I start to feel like I’m encased in this thick sort of coating. 

So she talks and talks and talks over the coffee and toast and she convinces herself that I’m going to reconsider.  But when we get home, I go to the director of my PhD group and I tell him that I want to resign and change groups and I tell him why. 

That creates a firestorm because she's very ambitious and she is very influential in the university.  People who should know a lot better react by saying, “Oh, no, no.  That wasn’t a big lie.  Don’t worry about that.  Don’t rock the boat.  She didn’t really mean it.  Maybe you misheard.” 

At the same time there's another crowd going, “Oh, my God.  The injustice!  It’s a travesty.  Take it to the papers.  It’s a scandal.  She should be fired.” 

What made it particularly difficult is I just won a national fellowship and it was the first time anyone at my university had ever won one. 

So the third crowd, the schadenfreude crowd, was sort of grinning and going, “Haha, you're making your adviser look really bad, aren’t you?”  They were really enjoying that moment. 

Me?  I was still flat.  I still felt like I was encased in that shell.  One minute I was thinking, “Oh, I’m betraying my group,” and the next minute I was thinking, “I’m making the worst decision in my life.  I've ruined my career.”  But really, I dropped fifteen pounds without even noticing. 

She is livid and she is vengeful.  So I realize I need to leave for a while.  I need to go into hiding. 

So I've been taking physical chemistry all the way on a different campus, different faculty, just so I could learn a little bit about mathematical understanding and quantitation, and I say, “You know, maybe I should go over there for three months for the summer and just do a little bit of research over there.  And when I come back, I'll change into a new group.”  And everybody who was involved was like, “Oh, what a great idea.” 

So in the middle of an MD-PhD, I set up a three-month hiatus.  I’m going to go do this thing.  It’s going to work out well.  I’m going to come back and join this new cell biology group.  I’m going to get on with my career.  It’s going to be fantastic. 

So I grit my teeth, I look forward and I go.  And I fall in love - scientific love. 

I find myself getting up at four in the morning to do calculus out of textbooks.  I am captivated by the idea that you can use mathematics to describe light and how light interacts with materials. 

At the end of the three months, I didn’t want to go back to cell biology, so I didn’t.  In fact, I never finished the last two years of medical school either.  My PhD wound up being in medical sciences but actually on some fairly hardcore chemical physics. 

Now, twenty-five years later, I’m a professor of physics and chemistry and I have a lab that’s called The Photon Factory.  What we study is how molecules convert the energy in light into other forms. 

For example, in vision.  The first step is light turned into mechanical motion.  In photosynthesis, you turn light into a little battery.  And right now, in your blood, your molecules that make your blood red are absorbing light and trying to get into molecular scale heat in fifty millionths of a billionths of a second just so you don’t photodegrade when you go out in the sun. 

I have a fantastic group of students and staff who are exploiting all of that understanding to do things like figure out how to get better patient outcomes from laser surgery of bone.  They study how renaissance art pigments fade, how we might do better at curing cancer using light.  Heck, we even have a project that looks at the interaction of light with living cells to sort sperm by sex for the dairy industry. 

So nowadays, my elevator pitch starts with, “I’m passionate about lasers and sperm.” 

And all of that from a ten-second lie at a conference. 

But actually, was it really the lie that was the main point of that transformation?  I mean, it’s not like she lied about autism being caused by vaccines.  And I knew that we had a problem.  I had been agonizing over things that were happening. 

We actually once did an experiment over and over and over until we got the right answer four times out of seven.  Then we published it. 

So it basically gave me some moral clarity.  It gave me the trigger to leave what I kind of already knew was a bad situation. 

So what I think the real transformation was about fame.  It’s about the tension between doing excellent high-impact science and being a famous scientist. 

So you can probably tell that I love science whether it’s immune cells or lasers.  But what was I worried about going into that conference?  I was agonizing over being impressive.  I wasn’t anxious about how much I would learn.  I was anxious about whether I could shine.  Without even knowing it, I was attracted to that bright light of fame.  I didn’t know I was attracted to it until I watched my adviser just ahead of me burst into flames. 

Thank you.