Hidden Red Flags in Academia: Dysfunctional Labs & Bad Science
How a badly run lab can harm your health and career
Most PhD students worry about bad supervisors, but a dysfunctional lab can be just as damaging to your research and career.
At first, the issues seem minor—a bit of disorganization here, some messy lab practices there.
But soon, you realize:
📌 There’s no system for training new people.
📌 Experiments get repeated—not for accuracy, but to manipulate results.
📌 Resources keep “disappearing” because no one trusts the shared system.
📌 The lab’s goal isn’t to test hypotheses—it’s to prove a predetermined outcome.
If you see these red flags, you’re not just in a bad lab—you’re in a bad research environment.
Let’s break down the dysfunctional lab signs that no one warns you about.
🚨 Red Flag #1: New People Don’t Get Trained—So Chaos Reigns
The first sign of a dysfunctional lab? There’s no structured training.
🔹 New students arrive, and instead of a proper onboarding system, they’re told:
💬 “Just ask around.”
💬 “Figure it out as you go.”
🔹 No one explains:
📌 How ordering works (so essential reagents are constantly out of stock).
📌 Who’s responsible for lab maintenance (so bins overflow and equipment goes unserviced).
📌 Basic protocols and best practices (leading to sloppy, inconsistent experiments).
💡 Why This Is a Huge Red Flag:
It’s demoralizing to put effort into doing things properly when the PI doesn’t care if others follow basic standards.
Too relaxed of an environment = nothing runs properly → Mistakes pile up, work is constantly redone, and the lab becomes stressful instead of productive.
It takes a toll on mental health—watching others ignore protocols without consequences while you try to maintain standards is exhausting.
Combined with no hierarchy, this creates daily tension.
🔹 Postdocs trying to set standards are seen as “bullies.”
🔹 New students complain to the PI instead of learning lab expectations.
🔹 Stress levels rise because no one knows what’s expected.Every mistake costs time and money. If new people aren’t trained properly, expect constant errors.
People operate in survival mode. Instead of working efficiently, lab members waste time fixing mistakes that could’ve been avoided.
The lack of structure means senior members get frustrated and leave, making turnover even worse.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Ask new students: “How did you learn how the lab runs?”
If they say, “I just had to figure it out”—🚩 expect ongoing chaos.
Observe: Do postdocs and senior PhDs seem frustrated, or are they actively mentoring?
Are people reluctant to share their experience? 🚩
🚨 Red Flag #2: Cell Stocks Are Always Contaminated
Contamination happens occasionally in any lab, but when it’s constant and no one cares, that’s a serious red flag.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Ask: “How often do people deal with contamination?”
If they say “Oh, all the time” or “It’s just part of cell culture”—RUN.
Look at the tissue culture hoods before committing to cell work in the lab.
If contamination is happening all the time, it’s not bad luck—it’s a bad lab culture.
🔹 When cell cultures, bacterial stocks, or experimental samples are constantly getting contaminated, it’s a sign of:
📌 Poor sterile technique (people aren’t trained properly).
📌 Bad habits that no one corrects (pipettes lying around, messy hoods, dirty incubators).
📌 No accountability (instead of addressing the issue, people ignore it).
💡 Why This Is a Huge Red Flag:
If no one takes responsibility, expect months of wasted work when your results turn out to be unreliable.
Contamination delays projects—and in the worst cases, leads to research misconduct if bad data gets published.
If a lab accepts contamination as “normal”, the real issue is negligence.
🔴 Personal Story: The Time I Cleaned a Tissue Culture Hood… And Regretted It
I once decided to deep-clean the tissue culture hood because it was a mess.
I expected to wipe down some dust. What I actually found?
🔹 Dry media caked onto the surfaces
🔹 Pipette tips stuck in the corners
🔹 Broken glass, syringes, and even needles
🔹 It looked like no one had cleaned it in YEARS.
At that moment, I realized:
📌 This wasn’t bad luck—it was bad lab culture.
📌 The contamination problems weren’t random—they were inevitable.
📌 If people aren’t held accountable for keeping a lab clean, they definitely aren’t careful with their experiments.
📌 No one took responsibility for maintaining sterility, which meant I couldn’t trust the quality of experiments.
That’s when I made my decision: I wasn’t going to work with cells in that lab.
🚩 If a lab accepts constant contamination as “just the way things are,” the real issue is negligence.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Ask: “What happens if there’s contamination?”
If the answer is “It just happens sometimes”—🚩 you’re walking into a lab with no accountability.
Look at shared equipment. If it’s filthy, the science is probably just as messy.
Look up guidance for sterile working conditions and ask how well these are followed. How often is tissue culture cleaned and by who? Is there separation of reagents and equipment? If there are no clear answers it’s a red flag.
💬 Have You Ever Experienced This?
🔥 Have you ever cleaned a lab space and found something horrifying?
🔥 Have you worked in a place where contamination was just ignored?
🚨 Red Flag #3: Everyone Hoards Their Own Reagents
A well-run lab shares resources efficiently. A dysfunctional lab? Everyone has their own private stash.
🔹 Instead of using communal reagents, people hide supplies in their own drawers.
🔹 Why?
📌 Ordering is unreliable—so when something runs out, it stays out of stock for months.
📌 People don’t trust the system—because the PI or lab manager isn’t keeping things organized.
📌 Lab members fight over resources—instead of focusing on research.
💡 Why This Is a Huge Red Flag:
It signals deeper mismanagement. If the lab can’t even track basic reagents, what else is falling apart?
New students get screwed over. If you don’t know where supplies are hidden, you waste time searching for materials that should be accessible.
This culture breeds secrecy instead of collaboration.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Look around—are reagents well-labeled and stored properly?
Ask: “How does ordering work? Does the lab ever run out of key materials?”
If people don’t trust shared supplies, 🚩 expect ongoing frustration.
🚨 Red Flag #4: Experiments Get Redone Just to Make the Stats Look Good
Some labs don’t repeat experiments to validate findings—they do it to manipulate results.
🔹 Instead of following the data, researchers are pressured to keep rerunning tests until:
📌 They get a p-value below 0.05.
📌 The data “fits” what the PI expected.
📌 The results look clean enough to publish.
🔹 This isn’t scientific rigor—it’s p-hacking.
💡 Why This Is a Huge Red Flag:
It leads to irreproducible results. Labs that manipulate data rarely produce findings that hold up long-term.
If you’re caught in this system, your work is at risk. Publishing manipulated results can damage your credibility and career.
It’s research misconduct in disguise.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Ask: “How often do experiments get repeated?”
If the answer is “Until we get significance”—🚩 that’s not science, that’s selective reporting.
🚨 Red Flag #5: Projects Are Designed to “Prove” Rather Than “Test” Hypotheses
🔹 The whole point of science is to test ideas—not confirm what we already believe.
🔹 But some labs design experiments to “prove” a hypothesis, rather than genuinely testing it.
🔹 This means:
📌 Negative results don’t get published.
📌 Only successful experiments get reported.
📌 The lab is more focused on flashy publications than scientific truth.
📌 Potentially interesting avenues are not followed up
💡 Why This Is a Huge Red Flag:
It creates a bias toward positive findings, leading to misleading research.
It discourages curiosity. If your job is just to confirm what the PI already believes, what’s the point of doing research?
It increases the risk of retractions when others can’t reproduce the findings.
✅ How to Spot This Early:
Ask: “How does the lab handle unexpected results?”
If the answer is “We don’t publish them”—🚩 run.
🚀 Final Thought: Dysfunctional Labs Aren’t Just Annoying—They Can Ruin Your Career
In my experience these red flags come a couple or more together at a time. A dysfunctional lab might not be a product of bad people - you might like your PI as a person - but the result is a VERY frustrating professional experience that will not bring out the best in you. Remember you will spend most of your days in frustration, anger, helplessness and feeling like your efforts are going down the drain. Ask yourself: is that price worth paying?
📌 A bad supervisor is one thing—but a chaotic, disorganized lab environment can waste your time, money, and effort.
📌 If you see one of these red flags, be cautious.
📌 If you see two or more, reconsider joining at all.
💬 Have you ever worked in a dysfunctional lab? What was the biggest red flag you ignored?