My other half experienced something similar, though, not completely sure it was malice. Her experimental results she had gathered for 6 months were kept on ice while she performed the necessary steps for the next stage. Another grad student "cleaned" the freezer locker and left only her experiments out. She lost 6 months of work. That grad student denied all involvement even though that grad student had been seen pulling everything out.

It happens all the time, too.

An observation: it's often best to keep the police out of your life, even when you think you've been wronged, unless you're confident you can prove your innocence.

The funny thing is that I can tell more stories about shady postdocs and mediocre post-docs than I can about fantastic postdocs. Of all the journal articles with results that are mysteriously difficult to reproduce, most of them that I've come across have been from shady postdocs.

One of the reasons I shied away from academia is the nature of the workforce, and how you have to treat them to get tenure.

This reminds me of a recent post on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731459

The postdoc thought it was subtle enough to kill those cultures with ethanol, and thought everybody else wouldn't be clever enough to catch him. But the grad student was probably clever enough.

This wasn't nearly as interesting as the title led me to believe: I thought it was going to be a Marvel Comics origin story.

I'd venture the offender is not really in his line of work for the right reasons if he does that. Just shows what's happened to science since it's founders' times.