A medical student has a summer job with a faculty mentor at
a research university. The student is bright, hard working, and industrious and
hopes to publish a paper at the end of the summer. He is the son of a colleague
of the mentor at a distant university. The student is working on a cancer cell
line that requires three weeks to grow in order to test for the development of
a specifi c antibody. His project plan is to identify the antibody by the end
of the summer. The student has written a short paper describing his work. The
mentor went over the raw data and found that some of the data were written on
pieces of yellow pads without clearly identifying from which experiment the
data came. She also noticed that some of the experiments shown in the paper’s
table were repeated several times without an explanation as to why. The mentor
was not happy about the data or the paper, but she likes the student and does
not want to discourage him from a potential career in research.
• What is the primary responsibility of the mentor?
• Should the mentor write a short paper and send it for
publication?
• Should the student write a short paper and send it for
publication?
• If you were the mentor, what would you do?
• Should the mentor or her representative have paid more
attention to the student’s work during the course of the summer? Should the
student been taught some quality control and/or GRP during the summer?
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