The next few weeks were the most stressful of Mary’s life. Everyone in the lab was tense. Padilla and Ly had identified other fabricated figures in the document and when Allen saw them she had to admit that Betsy had, at least, made bad decisions. Other problems surfaced. Some lab members had previously voiced concerns about the foundations of Goodwin's data. Others pointed out failures in other projects Goodwin had assigned them. There were issues with Goodwin's mentoring style. Many members questioned the interpretation Goodwin was giving their data. Members recalled other faculty members joking about Goodwin's “charitable” interpretations of data. A previous graduate student told Ly that Goodwin's short-cut behavior was “bound to catch up with her sooner or later.” As the lab discussed these concerns with renewed urgency, morale plummeted. In retrospect, Ly notes, there were numerous subtle clues, and a few more obvious ones: something was not right.

However, no one initially had the nerve to confront the leader. She was absent from the lab more often than usual. At the Union, conversation inevitably focused on her. What is going to happen to her? We do not want her hurt, nor the important genetics work she and we are doing. But what will happen to you? Where will you go if Betsy loses her position?

“Some of us,” recalls Allen, “began to lose weight. Others gained weight. We would tell ourselves as a group we are not going to talk about this, but we would anyway. We could not escape it. We ran ourselves in circles. First, we decided we would turn her in. But then we worried about her career and mental health. Betsy did not have much of a life outside science.”

“Finally, the group decided it must confront Goodwin. But who would do it? Padilla seemed the right one, and he agreed. He met with Goodwin twice before the end of the first week of November. Goodwin responded by meeting with the lab to explain her side of the story.

Allen recalls, however, that “Once we decided to go over her head and turn her in, we faced the biggest problem of all; we could not figure out to whom we should report her. I went on the web looking for advice. I found nothing, nothing on the UW site, nothing in journal articles, nothing on law enforcement pages. Sure, there was plenty of stuff on research misconduct-plagiarism and falsification of data-but nothing telling us to what to do to turn in a superior. One university site mentioned whistle-blowers, but only to say that, after the event, the grad students move to new labs. Of course, that only made us feel worse.”