Sima Guang Hater wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2019 5:06 pm
In 2013, we discovered that Andy Watkins is human scum who
cheated 3 ICTs worth of people out of a fair contest, including his own teammates. Worse than any other cheater before or after him (Baselius, Cam, Amit Bilgi, Steven Hines, Lane Silberstein, Josh Alman, Scott Putzig, and Joe Brosch), Andy was uniquely one of us, who wrote, edited, and played many tournaments, participated in many discussions, and generally was plugged into the community. He even had a leadership role in PACE (which he ran into the ground in 2011 before disappearing permanently from QB).
Let us also review some recent developments in the Watkins Saga...
I've got a thing that I've wanted to get off my chest for months now. This post convinced me to do it. I apologize that this is a personal ethical quandary that I'm asking about, but it's also an important one, and I'd appreciate measured responses.
For those curious, Andy Watkins is currently doing a post-doc in Rhiju Das' lab at Stanford. I know this because this a lab that my group collaborates with very heavily; they're the most important lab in the world doing computational RNA design and structure prediction (remember
[email protected]? It's that same exact thing, but with RNA, not proteins). (example citation:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/223305v2)
Fortunately, this is not my particular specialty. But there is a graduate student in our lab who works _very_ closely with Andy--to the extent that Andy is mentioned, by name, in all of his presentations, and they have also become very close friends. They are also currently working on a pretty cool project that they would publish together (this would give me the dubious distinction of an "Andy Watkins number" of 2.

)
I've never actually met Andy; the scandal happened before I got involved with college quizbowl. Though I don't think there's a chance I would ever be forced to interact with him through science, I would refuse to do so. But the key point is: his academic career has definitely not been stunted by the scandal; in fact, I imagine that he has a tenure-track faculty job in sight, since being in the Das lab is considered pretty prestigious.
The ethics have eaten at me. For the past two years, I decided to be a bystander, since I don't personally feel comfortable telling my colleague to refuse to work with Andy for a thing that he did as an undergraduate. Andy's suggestions have been a huge asset to my colleague's research and they are likely to publish high with the support of a collaborator in the Das lab. Perhaps Rhiju knows what happened and accepted Andy's apologies. It's also entirely plausible that he doesn't know at all, and I could very easily make public some information that would wreck Andy's academic future. ("Google Andy Watkins quizbowl")
Is it incumbent on me to do something about this? To what extent should I (or any of us, really), be blamed for allowing his career to progress? I have no evidence that he committed fraudulent research or anything that should prevent him from working on, like, life-saving RNA therapeutics; should quizbowl cheating be a crime that ends a career?
Edit: I've asked a few non-involved science people about this (withholding names) and they unanimously agreed that it was not my place to jump in; obviously, this is a different community with a very defined set of justified beefs.