For a successful academic, making a bunch of money in a lawsuit is the polar opposite of what they want to do with their life.

If you value doing science and inventing things and mentoring students and the prestige that comes along with it, simply getting a payday isn't anything like justice. Of course, such lawsuits serve more than simply attempting to actually get justice (which is usually impossible) but to dissuade the state from doing it again to others.

Which is cold comfort when all you wanted to do was play with heat transfer. He said he doesn't even want to apply for grant funding anymore, and I can't blame him. You don't become a professor studying heat transport because you're psyched to go toe to toe with the department of justice over made up nonsense that already wasted a year of your career directly and screwed up decades of accumulated talent and reputation.

Thats interesting it briefly reminds me about how I used to care about how I made money, like I used to find the concept of actually winning the lottery to be something disillusioning as opposed to earning due to acumen, for example

Now I just view not having money as a waste of time, its literally so time consuming and expensive

When in the opposite scenario nobody cares. you’re either in the club or you’re not, on a pool or in a yacht, at the villa or not, on the shareholder list or not.

> He had five or six active research projects, and during the months that followed, they slowed and faltered. The 15 postdoctoral students he worked with were transferred to other research groups, taking their knowledge with them.

> “We are all losers, right?” Dr. Chen said. “My reputation got ruined. My students, my post-docs, they changed their career. They changed to other groups. M.I.T., the country, the U.S., we lose. I can’t calculate the loss. That loss cannot be calculated.”

How would you solve this?

He can clearly document harms, too. A top-flight research group takes a lifetime, reputation, and resources to assemble.

It depends. From that article:

“However, the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors do not enjoy absolute immunity when they act as investigators by engaging in activities associated more closely with police functions.”