It’s baffling that RZ asked me to leave Berkeley Lab on the grounds of “lack of funding” (though my funding was ongoing, my appointment was ongoing till end of year) and also because he thought what I did was “not science” but just a “pretty, artistic model with no scientific use”. So, on funding and performance grounds, I had to leave.
Interestingly these are the exact termination clauses in my employment offer letter too.
This is what Berkeley Lab had to say about it:
“In relation to your claim that Dr. Zuckermann prematurely cut off your funding, as all Principal Investigators, Dr. Zuckermann retains absolute discretion with regard to project staffing. Consequently, he had no obligation to continue funding you after yours expired.”
This sentence is all fine and dandy, but my offer had not expired and was valid for another 5 months after my forced departure – a minor detail that the investigator overlooked in a rush to support RZ. She might as well have said that as a luminary, RZ can get away with anything, and institutional rules of etiquette doesn’t apply to him. In other words they are using the “academic freedom” clause.
Plus, note that she is reducing me to “project staffing”.
Also, here’s a screenshot from my offer letter showing I still had some more time left:
Even more strangely and parallely RZ thought the complete opposite too where JM was concerned – that there was more work to push forward to that justified bringing in new people, “It was entirely appropriate and consistent with practices in all labs for Dr. Zuckermann to have Dr. Muzard continue to push the work forward. Students use and build on each other’s work all the time, and it would be unreasonable and a waste of funds to stop work on projects from which students have departed. Science is about individuals building on one another’s work.”
Summary of message (for me from RZ): No funds. Do art.
Summary message (for JM from RZ): Not a waste of funds. It’s Science.
Plus in the above sentence, the investigator was also stating that this plagiarizing of my work into someone else’s proposals was okay so as to continue to push forward. I was told that there was nothing to push forward to because it is not a scientific work.
It’s hilarious to see science – and its grand importance in general – getting precedence over any single researcher’s life. This comedy was being paraded in front of me to justify unfairness and discrimination towards me. Gaslighting.
After I left in July 2014, nothing new was added to the project. They regurgitated, exhibited and published posters of my same work without any intellectual enhancements, under RZ’s guidance, but without mentioning that it is my work. Mini Makerfaire exhibit report in Oct 2014 is one such example.
Months before, in May 2014, at the main Maker Faire that RZ and I attended together, he had failed to correct every instance of “She is just a helper. He is the science guy, ask him.” proceeding to explain the work to people in the maker fair and ignoring these sexist comments. He failed to point out to them that it was actually my work. I didn’t realize at that time that his uncooperative attitude to clarify my status rooted from his plan to take over my work.
It has been my real experience that public likes to see a man as the science guy. Because of the inherent bias that exists in the world, one should be even more burdened with proper crediting. But RZ’s non-clarifications were intentional.
NIH Talk
Next year, in January 2015, without telling me RZ gave a talk about my work at NIH Rockville “Science in 3D” conference. I should have been told about this invite and asked to give the talk instead. I didn’t see any extra work or slides in his talk-video, it was just my work. Without my permission, he used my slides, removed my name from the slides and put his name there instead, removed my pictures and put his pictures and his face instead – and added an acknowledgment slide of his own liking to create further illusion.
Fact-check: I had posted my slides in SlideShare several months before he appropriated it in his talk and one could compare that they are identical and that his is a subset of mine. SlideShare posts are dated, so it’s an easy check to do.
It’s nice to note that taking other’s slides and just adding an orange bar plus <your institute name> at the bottom, enables ownership to people and then they can convert those into a talk of their own without explicitly mentioning the source. Easy tip: They can do this simply by deleting the author’s name out and putting their own instead in the title slide, and obviously the presence of that orange bar is a must. This tip will certainly make me a fast, famous and productive scientist – so, thank you for the useful tip and thumbs up to orange bars and swapped names; I recommend.
Good thing that NIH took and posted video of the entire Day 2 available at http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=15417&bhcp=1
Thank you NIH. What are we waiting for? Let us go watch this movie.
RZ’s presentation starts at 1:15:35 of this video, which is a 5-hour long video of the entire day’s proceedings of Day 2 of a 2-day conference. The talks of Day1 can be found here (6.5 hours).
It is gravely entertaining to see him mansplaining my work through the talk, and struggling and stumbling. It’s a weird feeling to see my work being presented by someone other than me; it’s like an out-of-body experience.
Okay so he was not satisfied with talking alone. He then posted his talk, sliced out of NIH’s, at his YouTube channel with the title “Ron Zuckermann discusses Peppytides at the NIH Science in 3D Festival”. The title seems to be a delightful effort towards eclipsing my name from my work. Mentioning me in fine-prints to cover the technicalities, and his name in bold in title is a childishly funny tactic.
Anything other than clearly saying “I am presenting Promita Chakraborty’s work” would be a manipulation of the truth. It is amusing that he manipulated the truth everywhere. We met mid-February at the AAAS Annual Meeting symposium, approximately three weeks after this talk. Plus there were the press reports (next section) and the posted video. He didn’t talk about why I had to learn about all these from the internet, and not from him. Is that strange?
It is pretty weird that someone was doing a scientific talk with a scientific audience in a scientific institute with entirely my work and slides, and forgetting to mention that specific detail in the acknowledgement, instead referring to me in five seconds as a “really talented student” who had worked in “this”, but remembering strangely to add filler acknowledgment-people to give the feel of a research “team” led by himself and probably to justify the “we”. I also don’t know what that huge logo of the 9th Peptoid Summit is doing in the acknowledgement – probably he wanted to advertise his peptoid fame to the NIH crowd. Or maybe it was his kind gesture to help me by adding some ornamentation with nice-looking graphics plus names of some people as decorative fonts, so that I wouldn’t feel all alone in that ack slide. I have company! I should be thankful. Thank you.
It is weird too that behind the wall I was already told repeatedly that I neither had any scientific acumen nor a prospective career in science, so being an “artist” was my only shot at a career, if any, and that he would help me with my career if I made a company with him with 50-50 partnership as his best offer for “other ways to explore getting these models out there”.
It is funny that someone who claims to be the “lead developer” in media articles, gave a totally wrong answer to an audience question during the talk, about whether any calculation/prediction was done for the magnet positions.
Here’s the Q&A panel in live action. Let’s see for real what mansplaining looks like.
Q (@2:25:33): Dr. Zuckermann, for your rotational potentials [where you put magnets trying to simulate potentials], how did you decide where to put the magnets, or did you work the other way around and develop a model that said these are where the magnets should be? Actually you could place the magnets to much better fit the profile if you modeled it back the other way around. Maybe you did.
A (@2:25:55): “No we … we basically went from you know the PDB histogram and tried to um, you know tried to approximate that with just you know with just placing two magnets, you kn… so it would be… you know there are actually technologies where you can print micromagnets and get a much more detailed… um… array. Our goal was to try and make something that people could make at home or in a workshop with commercially available simple magnets. Um, so this is … it is admittedly a simple approximation of what… uh how close can you get with just having two magnets.”
This is an embarrassing answer. Embarrassing for me that you sat in front of a roomful of colleagues and said that. This pathetic answer soils my reputation. That’s all I’m going to say.
Moving on, for those who really want to know, I can provide the correct answer (skip next paragraph otherwise):
Yes, I did both. I actually did a three way analysis. I used data from Protein Data Bank to get the histogram peak-values, and then used a Gaussian fit to model the behavior, and fitted the exact values of the magnet-positions as peak values. The overlap of these two graphs and how well they fit, can be judged from figure 3a & 3b of my 2013 PNAS paper (that’s the paper he was presenting in the talk), while the graphs in figure 4 come from the opposite direction. They measure the combined strength of the magnet arrays representing each peak in terms of potentials in order to show the measurements of how well the magnets emulate this scheme of the peaks of the PDB data and the Gaussian fit.
It is very perplexing to me that I have been called “a coauthor” of this PNAS paper in the Lab letter.
I think NIH should take caution about whom to invite about which topic/talk, if they want to make a serious dent in unblocking women scientists’ pathways. This is one of the PREVENTION steps that are necessary to stop a chain-reaction of abuse and discredit.
In the past, NIH has taken action when under backlash mode. From their website, about action taken for Achieving Gender Equity at Conferences after backlash. No protest, and so no action, for inviting the correct speaker for any topic, so far.
Even as late as July 2017, RZ has refused to take down his YouTube video, citing,
“This video is a portion of a live webcast from the Science in 3D Festival at the National Institutes of Health on 1/21/15. My talk was a presentation based on my federally-funded research, presented at a federal institution …”.
This message was sent to me when I wanted YouTube to remove the video (I have emails). Thus RZ’s claim to spotlighting on himself is because of the following reasons, as per his own words and logic: (1) He gave talk, (2) He presented at NIH premises, (3) Video has been live webcast by NIH thus proving #(1) & #(2), and (4) it was “his” federally-funded research because, you guessed it – PI. Probably people can see that at this point he had started using funding bodies and other scientific organizations as an ARMOUR justification against me.
It is funny to keep witnessing RZ’s continued fight for claiming my work while smearing me with an incompetence tag. Based on his response, YouTube said to me that they are unable to remove the video, in spite of being made aware that the slide copyright is mine, citing “Section 512(g) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.
Media Coverage
A month before the NIH talk, around Dec 2014-Jan 2015, there were a bunch of press reports, starting with Live Science and then widely circulated in slightly different narrations by NBC news, Fox news, Yahoo news, 3Dprinting.com and many more prominent news sites with claims like this:
- “Zuckerman’s team began using 3-D printing because…”,
- “models of real proteins that he calls ‘peppytides'”.
It is funny that all of those articles forgot to mention my name while covering my work. Looks like I am an abstract entity and “Zuckermann’s team” is my new firstname and lastname. Nice to have a new name, thank you.
The articles assigned the credit to RZ who conveniently blamed the omission on the reporters. According to him, he always mentions me in interviews, he emailed me.
Some of those news articles from 2014/2015 can be found as below:
- LiveScience, ‘3D Printing Molecules Can Reveal New Insights,’ https://www.livescience.com/49278-3d-printing-molecules.html
- NBC News, ‘3-D Printed Molecule Models Solve Protein Puzzles,’ https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/3-d-printed-molecule-models-solve-protein-puzzles-n277141
- Fox News, ‘Scientists using 3D-printed models to study biological molecules,’ https://www.foxnews.com/health/scientists-using-3d-printed-models-to-study-biological-molecules
- Yahoo News, ‘3D Printing Molecules Can Reveal New Insights,’ https://news.yahoo.com/3d-printing-molecules-reveal-insights-142234863.html
- Digital Engineering, ‘Molecular Modeling Helps Drug Researchers,’ https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/molecular-modeling-helps-drug-researchers/
- 3D Printing Industry, ‘3D Printed Molecule Models to Aid Medical Research,’ https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/3d-printed-molecule-medical-39246/
- 3Dprint.com, ‘‘Peppytides’ and 3D Printing Make Complex Molecular Activity More Transparent,’ https://3dprint.com/34181/peppytides-and-3d-printing/
- Strangely photo credits also went to RZ.
I reached out to Live Science, they didn’t fix or respond.
Before we proceed, a note about the “Photo courtesy of Ron Zuckerman, Berkeley Lab” in all the news articles out there:
The photos should have credited me instead – I do not think that it is too much to ask for. These are the photos of my work that I took. It took me a couple of months to compose and plan – especially what protein structures to make, how to best highlight the accuracy of folds, structures and dynamics of the model. This was not really just photography and artwork, these were photos to scientifically support the accuracy of my work. Before these photos (and my video demo that was published with the paper, yes these are my hands demo-ing), it was considered not feasible to have protein folding represented dynamically in scaled physical models. It was the first of its kind of work, proving the potential feasibility of this direction of research. My work with physical scientific computing and modeling is not just an artwork, this is a new science, a new field, a new way of looking into how nature works and how we may best compute those.
Now about the in-house articles.
An article about RZ’s peptoid research at Berkeley Lab News that had nothing to do with Peppytides, begins with him claiming himself as the lead developer of my work:
“As a senior scientist and Biological Nanostructures Facility Director at the Lab’s Molecular Foundry, thinking in three dimensions comes naturally to Ron Zuckermann. He is, after all, the lead developer behind the Peppytide protein models, an award-winning 3D hands-on educational tool. When he’s not thinking of fun ways to teach chemistry in 3D, however, Zuckermann and his team of researchers are designing two-dimensional peptoid …” (Dec 2014) [from: Mimicking Nature for Homeland Security]
Hold that thought about thinking in three dimensions until the next Parts, and let’s cover other grounds first.
The illusion of “Zuckermann Peppytides”, “Zuckermann lab”, “Zuckermann team” hijacking my work was all over the Internet, like some propaganda.
UC Berkeley news wrote:
“About a month ago, we discussed the toxin-detecting work of Ron Zuckerman. Well, he’s in the news again for creating a standardized 3D-printed models of proteins called “peppytides” that help researchers visualize proteins and their interactions. Plus, they can totally make some sweet toys for your child nerds-to-be.”
Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry website said:
“NBC News Highlights Foundry Work
Ron Zuckermann’s Peppytides were recently featured in a broadly distributed story used by NBC, Fox News, and Yahoo! News about how 3-D printed molecule models are helping to solve protein puzzles”
RZ’s homepage announced:
- “December 30, 2014
- Our research is mentioned on NBC News!
- 3-D Printed Molecule Models Solve Protein Puzzles”
- “January 4, 2015
- Peppytide models uploaded to the NIH 3D Print Exchange database.”
The omission is subtle and clever; the “our” and “we” refers to this abstract thingy called Promita, and nicely done. I get it, this is supposed to be some kind of secret inner joke between the two of us, isn’t it?
To people who are looking for how to correct their sentences, it is “Chakraborty’s Peppytides” please (not “Zuckermann’s Peppytides”). I came to Berkeley Lab with the vision and the design, I implemented it, I drew out the 3D CAD models, I 3D printed, assembled and I made the prototypes, collected data, did computations, wrote necessary programs and scripts, wrote the paper (and the PhD dissertation), wrote the proposals, and did other tests and measurements. I wrote the next papers. I cannot be an abstract entity, can I.
I coined the name too, for reasons that could be found in this blogpost I wrote about the history of Peppytide invention.
Correspondence about this behavior
I had initially tried to reason with RZ. An email conversation with him about the above problem on Jan 25, 2015 is below. It was midnight and I was shocked.
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Promita Chakraborty wrote:
Hi Ron,
Hope everything is going fine. I just saw some recent articles cited in the LBL web site and elsewhere. It is very good that peppytide is advertised but I am surprised to see that those recent ones do not mention my contribution. All other previous article mentioned me as it was supposed to.
What bothered me most in those recent news feeds are phrases like “Zuckermann’s Peppytide”, another one claims you as the lead developer. I have been working/writing about physical biomodeling before I came to LBL. I even have very early physical biomodels and manipulatives published and presented as posters, and submitted as grant proposal before Berkeley. Furthermore, Peppytides is my PhD work and I am the main inventor and main developer. Since I am trying to build a career on top of this work, I do not want any wrong information to harm my reputation. It would be great if you can update or fix those news feeds?
Best,
– Promita
His response within an hour:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:21 AM, Ron Zuckermann wrote:
Hi Promita,
Please know that whenever I present this work or am interviewed, I always acknowledge you.
Also you should know that we were in fact joint inventors. There is no such thing as a “main inventor”. Also, I raised the funds and am the PI and thus it is reasonable and common to be referred to as the lead investigator. With respect to the invention, I think you are aware, since you terminated our patent attorney, any future commercialization of the Peppytides is severely limited. It is really sad, and I still don’t understand why you did that. I have been approached by several investors, but alas we have no patent protection. So in fact there are actually no inventors of peppytides.
How are your career plans proceeding? Are you still shooting for academia?
-Ron
Hence, this was intentional.
Manipulative words. Shifting the blame to me. And a reminder of his PI-ship.
The duality in his personality was exhausting. It was as if he was looking for any workable excuse to dismiss me. When I kept my head down and didn’t think about protecting my work for years, every accomplishment was taken away from me, including my right to get a job in the field. When I kept silent later to protect my work, I was rebuked as an outcast. When I am silent, I am told to coordinate as a team player. When I did share my work and credit in the past, the ‘team’ actually meant just himself and I was erased out. Pointing that out to him meant I was too aggressive and difficult and overinflating [my] significance. Not stopping him meant it was his ‘cutting-edge work’ and that I accept that. He wanted my ideas all right, but he just didn’t want me to claim ownership. I was to be a ghost-researcher aiming to put him on a pedestral, like one of those ghost-writers of novels. I opted out.
I opted out.
After making my life and career painfully hard for a year since I had left, I think it slowly dawned on RZ around mid-2015 that his “team” could not proceed without my help and expertise. So he changed from mean to nice again. He sent me an email in mid-2015 to reinstate communication and asked me to share my plan and work with him again. He said, “I am interested in re-establishing communication with you, so we can stay coordinated in our efforts, and also because I do care about you!” Strangely, he can switch to sweet-talk when he needs to. He continued, “I am a bit puzzled as to why you have not been willing to discuss anything with me. I have found it is very fruitful for students and their former advisors to stay in touch throughout their careers, even if they are working in the same fields. It would really be much better for both of us to coordinate and to help one another. If you are really interested in keeping the work open source, then part of that means open communication. Please consider re-establishing dialog.” (Email dated Jun 7, 2015 7:04 AM)
I had fallen into that trap earlier, and was already experiencing the consequences.
No thank you. I opted out.
Moreover, he continued presenting my work and giving interviews without crediting me which showed me that he was not at all serious about collegial collaboration. His behavior was already a massive red flag. He had already kicked me out. He had already refused to give me letters. He had already made me invisible.
One needs to be patient with new ideas. One needs some leniency and peace of mind. But the harassment has been too much to sustain patience and focus required for deep work.
It is funny that RZ has fought so hard to keep claiming (and flaunting) the work that he doesn’t even consider as science in my presence. It is funnier that as the creator of the work instead of being acknowledged for my scientific creativity, I got the label from him of being scientifically incompetent, with a push and advice on how I could pursue a career in art by tinkering with things and making them colorful and aesthetic. His rationale for this advice was because the Peppytide models were “aesthetically pleasing”.
It is funny too that in the talks, interviews and media articles done in my absence, I get the impression that he thinks it is pretty important science.
This two-facedness and associated disparate treatment has been a theme of his daily interaction with me throughout my employment at The Molecular Foundry, that I was too naïve to catch for a very long time. It was very confusing, very deceptive, and psychologically very harmful at the end. It damaged me in every way: life, career, health, mind.
And working alone with no team probably made me an easy target in his slow game of “she” to “we” to “I” conversion. Working alone probably makes one an easier target of bullying and harassment.
RZ had conveniently interchanged “I”, “we”, “she” as per his needs. He had also conveniently interchanged “grad student” “collaborator” “researcher” “Research Associate” “employee” “research assistant” for me as it suited the moment for him – the federal fundings gave him the power to do so, he said. PIs can do anything, I was told. Not Cc-ing me in important emails had added to the confusion. He used the inherent ambiguity of English language as a tool to fuel this confusion intentionally and over multiple years.
In the next part, the story continues with some concrete examples demonstrating this contradictory behavior.