So here is the situation: I look a 3 year postdoctoral position with a world famous chemistry professor who was in his late 70s at the time. During the 3 year period it seemed there was a real chance to send out novel work in a journal. However, at the end of the 3 year period my professor got unusually sick and started having breakdowns of sorts and has decided that since he doesn't like how the theoretical results look, he doesn't want them to be send out because it would not be presentable in a top journal and he only wants top journals. I am wondering if this means my ability to have a science career is doomed forever (this is my first postdoc after a PhD). I mean, at the time he had a solid track record of producing publishable work and it seemed the work he was doing had the potential to lead to novel results and I was not anticipating he'd break down this way/ What does this mean for me?

I had completed my PhD last year and had some things I was wondering about with regards to what can happen afterwards. So when it comes to my experiences in grad school and afterwards, I often fear that I don't know what options I have to stop someone coming after me. As a recent example, I am trying to get my account from grad school active so I can run codes with it. In order to do that, the computing services department at the University where I got the PhD needs to set it up again. It might end up that they negligently erased all the algorithms on my computing workspace on their work station. That would mean that while I have the data sets themselves, I wouldn't have the algorithms needed in order to recreate the thesis results. I wonder if the University could then say, since these results are not reproducible since you don;t have all the algorithms since we destroyed them, we will now revoke your PhD. Or perhaps even deliberately destroy my algorithms since they could do it unexpectedly and then revoke my PhD since it would mean that technically I have results that re not reproducible. I often get fears because I don't know what would happen if a University were to do that and how easy it would be for them to get away with it.

My current situation is as follows:

I have completed a PhD in physics and have three completed publications from that tenure, two from one lab and one in another. I am a year and a few months into a postdoc I managed to land in chemistry and I do not know what I have done will be able to be published successfully within three years. If it is not it seems I am completely doomed to be jobless in industry or academia. Right now I am looking to simply keep working on the projects I am doing with my PI in my postdoc and see what side projects are available and what collaborators are available. What other things do I need to do if I want to make sure I have any chance at all at going into either industry or academia?

So I have competed a PhD in science at a major research university and am doing a post doc that is going much better than it was 3 weeks ago.

However, I am wondering what to do if it turns out that something P produced for my thesis is not 100 % reproducible when other scientists try and run the same code and/or if it turns out I made computing mistakes that may change my thesis and how valid it was.

Basically, the project involved taking a highly complex code written by a computer scientist, without comments or clear organization, comprehending ti and restructuring it to make various computations for analysis. It is possible that a fit value I calculated was not being done 100 % correctly because the code needed to be rewritten in a way that neither I nor the computer scientist who wrote it were aware of at the time and so I would need to make the necessary adjustments. There's a good chance this is not the case but it is possible. Also, for one condition, I got a fit value of 1.45 after a number of runs and someone else may get repeated runs of something like 1.75, 1.69 or 1.58, in part because the procedure uses semi random processes.

I am worried about the possibility to either discovering something I did not realize as a graduate student and needed to fix it in later publications, or having someone else rerun the procedure and get somewhat different values as I mentioned above and this being used as grounds to revoke my PhD. It is also possible that since the procedure had about 50 or so steps that I may have accidentally overlooked 1-2 of the 50 steps being done a certain way that may result in slightly different values when someone tries to replicate what I did.

There was no plagiarism anywhere in my thesis and no made up data. All the runs in the thesis were actually done and all the fit values and functions used in the thesis were authentically generated and there was no doctoring the results by artificially making them lower or replacing a given data set with a lower value to make it look better. In fact the PI even expressed some concern at one point about the values i was getting but I maintained that these are the true values and did not doctor it at all.

In light of this how plausible would it be to have a PhD revoked on grounds of the university being angry about the fact that I did not realize something was missing in the code the computer scientist sent or being angry that my results are not 100 % duplicable? Should I really be thinking about how to address this?