I am at Part 5 now but the narration is not getting any easier. One two three start.
RZ wanted to build a research program plus a company based on my work, but couldn’t proceed without my help. This seems to be one of his primary grudges against me because it kept turning up in every conversation during my end-days at Berkeley Lab and later in emails.
There were continued nasty comments, my last 3 months at the job. Multiple times RZ called me “difficult,” “aggressive,” “stubborn,” “disobedient” because I didn’t abide by his way of doing that patent – the reason why, he said, Indians are not as good as Europeans. He is of German origin, he said. He also talked about how Europeans are better researchers than Indians, the reason he brought in JM from France.
He yelled at me that the patent is a lost opportunity and that I am responsible for it to go awry. Then immediately said that it is sad that this was happening to him. He wasted no opportunity to blame me for this, even years after I had left. He emailed to remind me that I am responsible for this loss of his. Lab’s letter in response to my complaint, reminded me too. In AAAS’15 when we met, he reminded me yet another time. There were constant reminders that I am “not really a scientist” and should look for a career outside of academia and science.
He also said that his wife is a psychologist, and that because it is harder for them to talk chemistry together because she would not understand these hard concepts, he said they generally talked about psychology and because it is easy, he gets it. Thus he had learned a lot about how to psychologically handle people, as supervisory leaders should, he proudly said, adding that thus he had learned a lot about psychological managing.
The plan for the company was one long-drawn story. It was to be his “retirement plan,” he told me. The first company partnership offer started with 90-10 in a one-one meeting, his 90% because he said, “I am the PI,” my 10% because I would be the ‘primary researcher’. When I kept refusing, it was upped to 60-40 and then 50-50. The offer was indeed very weird, and the percent ownership was the least of my worries. He wanted me to work unpaid under his direction in this company to develop the next versions of the model.
But first about the patent. We all need a breather.
Patent
The cycle of throwing me out of my own initiatives almost happened for my patent in a very peculiar way. Almost. And here is that story in brief.
At first he petitioned to DoE behind my back, for a sole ownership of title and wanted me to agree to something without telling me that agreeing meant transferring of my rights to him for life. He literally sent me a draft paragraph to send to DoE agreeing to this transferring of rights to him, and urged me to immediately copy-paste that and send to DoE saying I agree (I have email).
With his mounting pressure on me to send to DoE this paragraph of consent, I did a bit of digging. Delving into records, I figured, “… one of the inventors, Ronald Zuckermann, would like to obtain title to the invention.”
When I questioned him, he backed out and blamed it on Berkeley Lab’s patent office saying, “I actually didn’t request sole ownership… our LBNL patent office came up with that language…I am more than happy to explore some kind of joint title if you wish.” (I have email).
Actually.
Some. Kind. Of. Joint. Title.
If I wish.
This, after he had already applied for sole ownership months before, behind my back, after he kept pressing DoE to release it, and after DoE had ultimately granted him the ownership of title awaiting my approval, after he had sent me that draft-paragraph for consent to copy-paste and to send to DoE, and was just waiting for me to do my signature and acceptance of the terms (I have complete and detailed documentation and all the emails).
I was shaking when I called the LBL patent office one morning, and asked why they had not bothered to CC me in all these filings. They said that RZ had told them that as I was a poor student I would not be able to afford bearing the costs anyway, and so as they understood, RZ thought that it was fair that he should have sole ownership because he would bear sole cost. I told them that, that was not the case about my bearing the cost. They apologized, and within an hour sent me an apology email saying they should have included me, and would make sure to include me from then on, which they did.
Someone in our floor at the lab said that RZ had told them that he was spending all the money to file a patent. This was news to me as well. I was too flabbergasted to clarify.
If DoE had not required needing of my signature, I would never have known about this title assignment until after it were too late. That’s exactly what had happened to all my proposals, with him being assigned the PI and the decision-maker (Part1).
After my fight-back, fast forward a few weeks and after the joint-version of title from DoE (around mid-2014), and after retaining a joint-attorney arranged by RZ (he was back to nice again and wanted me to accept being represented jointly by an attorney he had already found), something surreal happened. But that he had only one request: that we would pay the attorney fees with his card and would later split the cost 50:50 and that I would pay RZ back in cash.
So with our joint-attorney, mysteriously the inventor order was inverted in our initial USPTO filing: from (PC, RZ) [as recorded officially in both the 2011 ROI filing and the 2013 provisional patent] to (RZ, PC) so that it changed to being referred to as “Inventor: Ronald Nathan Zuckermann et al.” instead of “Inventor: Promita Chakraborty et al.” Very funny. He continuously tried to convince me that the order did not matter, for example in royalties et cetera, and that I should just do the signature and get it done with. When I didn’t agree he said that he should have just taken my signature before signing my PhD dissertation.
This initial filing was supposed to be followed by the final filing within a month in order to complete the filing.
Attorney’s email response when I questioned about the inverted order was, “I apologize for not reading the filing receipt more carefully before generating the documentation.” But he avoided fixing the order of names. He just didn’t fix. I asked him to. He just didn’t fix. I had to personally go to USPTO website and submit a correction myself. Plus somehow, very very strangely, my mailing address was also filed wrong, which I corrected as well. Otherwise, USPTO’s correspondences and communications to me, if any, would be lost until after it would be perhaps too late or too complicated for fixes and changes.
Funny, don’t know why somehow this feels like un-CC-ing feels like … my gut is messed up anyway, I need more yogurt.
Anyway, keep in mind that I had to give him the power of attorney before the initial filing.
This occurred after repeatedly telling RZ for more than a month that the order was important to me, while he tried to bully me and convince me every day that the order was not important at all.
So, I went and paid and talked briefly with another patent attorney to ask for advice and to ask the question about whether the order mattered. It did matter, in terms of who the first-named-inventor was going to be. I was so naïve until that time, it’s embarrassing. I consider the money spent on this attorney for a few minutes of advice (that was not cheap), to be at the top of my the-best-spendings-ever list.
Let’s get a crash-course with this learning card:
If we consider to keep the same order, as-is from the Provisional Patent, my name comes first.
If we consider doing alphabetical order by first name, my name comes first.
If we consider doing alphabetical order by last name, my name comes first.
What am I missing?
After my repeated request to our joint-attorney to fix the ordering was ignored, it was best to part ways without final filing. When I pressed him asking him to explain to me how he could make such a move, he backed out and dropped out, citing conflict between parties. This disconcerted RZ generating more nasty comments. He thought I would cave in under psychological pressure as deadline approached.
Retrospectively, this has been a good decision. Staying away from sources of deception is important and necessary for good health in life – and for doing good science.
Few months after leaving Lab, I founded QuezyLab by myself and started afresh. Though sans compensation and resources, I have the vision, and am sure that over time I can rebuild and grow my career from scratch.
Unfortunately from scratch. No wonder women’s careers progress so slow.
Company
As one could estimate, during my last months, it became scarier for me to go to work with each passing day with the push for either signing of a “legal agreement” between us, or assigning my portion of title off to his non-existent company after the patent filing was to be over, threat of ending my career, and then the 50-50 company partnership offer. My choice. I got choice!
He said if I did not accept, he would make sure I did not get any career opportunities as he is well connected and a luminary. Speaking of choices, choices are good to have.
According to his plan, all I needed to do was to come up with and submit another internal Foundry User proposal, and I would have had been spending the same amount of time at Berkeley Lab (albeit as an unpaid user with this shell-company’s affiliation) – so much so that I would feel like no change had occurred in my status. I would have had to work alone as I was to be the primary-whatever. And I was to give him the future patents and rights, and to his company, all my ideas and intellectual properties. He said that I would not feel the lack of affiliation, pay and position at all, that I would be doing the same research anyway, and at the same premises with the same facilities, and he would let me make some of the research open source, and if that’s all I wanted I should promptly accept and sign legal documents, especially if I wanted a letter of recommendation or an academic job in future, but that he thought ‘3D art’ was still the best choice for me anyway as a future career.
He said that he had a conflict-of-interest because of his position at Berkeley Lab and would not be able to do a new company with the same work, but that if I worked as an unpaid labor (new company! – his reasoning) under him as a Foundry User affiliated through this ‘company’ that he wanted to form, he would overcome and bypass that conflict by using me and my labor as a go-around through the technicalities of the conflict, using me as some kind of placeholder. As a quid pro quo, he would be able to kindly accept and sponsor me when I do apply for the next Foundry User Proposal(s) and would be able to ‘guide’ me. In fact he started bullying me to submit another user proposal in the next submission cycle. He said I would also have had to give him continued PI-credit and publication-credit for all my work, and all intellectual rights to the company, during my time as a Foundry User, as he was the Facility Director.
He thought that if he trapped me in into a compromised, jobless state, I would accept this crazy offer just because I was passionate about my work. I didn’t. So he urged me to first take a long break before I gave another thought to my career, to show who the boss was. I still didn’t accept and it enraged him even more, and he was giving me the silent-anger treatment while smiling on the surface.
So those were the conditions laid down for ‘offering’ me a non-paid, visiting user/researcher position in his lab (which I didn’t accept) after making me leave, in order for me to use Berkeley Lab’s and Molecular Foundry’s national, federally-funded user resources for my own research.
Those were the conditions laid down in order for me to continue my research, after he made sure I would not get a research position anywhere else. The offer got stranger fast with each iteration. This was a bizzare, nightmarish, quid pro quo offer that I obviously had to refuse. It was like a fealty. It is appalling especially because he knew that my career was balancing precariously on his recommendation, support and word of mouth.
Those were the conditions laid down for my career if I did choose to continue with my scientific work. I got choice. I chose to leave.
There were the subtlest reminders that if I didn’t do all these as per his advising, he would not be bound to give me letters for my future faculty position applications. This was never-ending.
He said that after I was done with development and IP transfers to the company, he would go to investors to raise money, whom he had already talked to and who had shown interest, and he said that I would have had to relinquish ‘some’ of my shares each time an investor joined – he wanted me to sign a paper agreeing so. He said he would not be relinquishing any of his shares though, because he was the PI. Then, he said, when he had retired from Berkeley Lab, he would take over running the company and I would have had to leave because I was just helping him out, and that the work was as per his advising anyway, and if I still needed letters after giving a thorough thought about my careers and competence, he would think about letters, but I would have had to convince him with consistent contribution to the company Intellectual Properties.
It’s the same tactic of using me as a substitution-placeholder-catalyst that I talked about in earlier Parts, but more egregious. Or at least more obvious to the new, matured version of me as I could now see through all these fun and games more clearly. Games is always fun. Funny is always game.
Nothing he said made me accept in spite of the continued threats. But it had left grave mental marks from which I am still recovering.
And I faced the consequences of that decision on my blocked career. So his threats were not really empty threats. Under the circumstances, there was no point applying for related jobs, federal fundings or peer-review submissions.
Keep in mind that all these were not happening in void, separately. They were happening simultaneously with other events that I have talked about in previous Parts. There were the bullying me out of my own current User Proposal. There were takeover by him and JM. There were them talking about forming a company etc. behind my back. There were me spending time training the new crew. There was this emptiness that was inevitable because I had no job offer to take up as the next thing. It seemed that everything bad was happening all at once.
He had also tried snatching away my personal laptop in order to copy data from it. He made clear he wanted all my research plans, slides, ideas and research data or whatever he conceived I’ve had as next steps. Very terrorizing experiences – and everything a safe workplace shouldn’t be.
Next is Award. Stay tuned.
Update (on Dec 6, 2019): Added Link to Part 6.