======= Date Modified 24 Feb 2011 08:42:59 =======

======= Date Modified 24 Feb 2011 08:44:07 =======
Thanks for the advice and support. I should have clarified about my finding. I can publish it in impact factor 12 as it is now. This was the plan when I revealed the result. Now the plan has changed because the lab head wants to aim for Nature. I have 6 months left - guess I have to just start all over again.

I wonder if anyone has come across a situation similar to mine, and all advice is appreciated.

I started my lab-based PhD and was bullied by the post-doc into doing menial work to contribute to his first author papers. He wrote timetables for my whole week filling in all the experiments I should do at all hours of the day, gave me the most unreliable, cheap and time-consuming techniques, refused to let me present my work at meetings as all of the results belonged to him, left my light-sensitive reagents out on the benchtop in the light while I was away on leave because he wanted the fridge space for something else, opened my mail, took prizes I won and removed the items he wanted and left the rest to me, put papers over my car keys when I left them on a bench, so I had trouble finding them etc.

I spent two years doing a useless method for him. When I had parts of an experiment which didn't work and other post-docs were telling me to drop that experiment and order a new design of reagent, he refused to let me and made me try more different conditions and remake all my other reagents again to see if any of those were at fault, so that I would waste more time.

After years of this I complained, and spoke to others, and the lab head eventually gave me a discrete project. With my new project, which started 5 months ago, I have made a significant discovery. Unfortunately my lab head says that the discovery is too big for a PhD student and will need to be worked on by a collaboration of labs. He says that I will be a middle author as the other work will contribute more. I said I was very unhappy with this, and that I should be a lead author on the discovery that I made. He said I would have to do all the back up work, and I can't do that as one person. I said that I would be willing to do as much as I can.

I have brought my own funding via a scholarship, and also won a $50 000 research grant early in my PhD for the lab. I am now running out of funding for my own PhD. I feel that I have been completely exploited.

I don't know what to do. I have asked for a PhD committee meeting with a representative from the university, but I fear that they won't be able to do much as they are colleagues of my lab head. Everyone that I speak to says that I am being treated unusually harshly. I am already aware of this, but I don't know how to change it. I am an MD doing a science PhD, and I think this might have something to do with how I have been treated.

Previous PhD students from the lab have had zero publications, and not gone on to do well/stay in science. I don't know what to do.