Jessica Osuna does not consider herself an emotional person, but when she came home one afternoon last December and found that someone had smashed in the door of her Albuquerque home and taken the laptop that contained her dissertation—six years of work—she wept.
“I just broke down,” she says. “That was like to lose a child.”
A doctoral candidate in ecological sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Osuna was not naïve about safeguarding her work. She ran automatic backups of her 15-inch MacBook Pro onto a small external hard drive. Then every other day or so, she copied her work onto a one-terabyte hard drive that she kept locked in a safe, in case of fire. But whoever burglarized her home busted open the safe and took that drive, too.
Ms. Osuna still has the raw data from her research—on seasonal trends in photosynthesis in a California oak savanna—but she lost much of Chapter 2 of the dissertation and all of Chapter 3. Reproducing them will be an enormous task. Even though Berkeley granted her emergency financial support for the spring semester, the setback means she may not finish in time to assume a National Science Foundation postdoc she was awarded.
“I wish I would have backed up just one CD of the processed final data, and then just e-mailed myself a copy of the manuscript every time I left it,” she says wistfully. “Those two things would have saved my butt.”
Or she could have backed up her data “into the cloud” by using an online service like Dropbox or Google Docs.
Just as it has gotten more convenient to safeguard the irreplaceable contents of computers, so has it become easier to walk off with the increasingly portable machines.
Last August a journalism student at Britain’s University of Gloucestershire lost two years of work when her MacBook Pro was taken during a burglary of her home. Four days later, a master’s student in history at the University of Calgary lost his thesis when someone removed his laptop from the trunk of his car while he was out for a run in a local park.
Nine days after the break-in at Ms. Osuna’s home, a University of Sussex student in anthropology and Spanish reportedly lost two laptops and four months’ worth of dissertation notes in a home burglary.
And as two University of Oklahoma prostate-cancer researchers dined at a Panera Bread cafe in January, someone snatched a data-swollen MacBook from the couple’s car, causing headline writers around the world to assert, “Cure for Cancer Stolen” (which probably had readers wondering how they’d missed the earlier news that a cure had been found).
Occasionally laptops do find their way home. A student at England’s University of Birmingham reportedly got her dissertation back in 2007 after the police used tracking technology to find her computer and 30 others that had been stolen.
Two years later, Robbyn Croney, a graduate student at England’s University of Bath who had been unable to provide a serial number for her stolen computer, despaired that she would ever see her dissertation again. As it turned out, they were reunited, thanks to a police raid on a stolen-goods ring and a clue worthy of an Agatha Christie mystery: Ms. Croney had told the investigators that her keyboard was missing the letter Q.
In each of those cases, the thieves were attracted not by the value of the research documents, but by the packages that contained them.
Such was the misfortune of Robert D. Pomije, whose completed dissertation was stolen in 1968, decades before the era of the laptop. A high-school principal at the time, he had used a stylish black briefcase to carry the lone copy of his dissertation to his adviser, who told him that it was “ready to defend” but for a few small typographical issues.
That put Mr. Pomije in a celebratory mood, so on the way home he treated himself to a soda at a local bowling alley. Back at his house, he looked into the back seat and realized that the briefcase was missing.
“That was a sad thing,” recalls Mr. Pomije, who gives his age today as “85 and a half.” He had toiled for 12 years on the dissertation, during which time his first wife died, and he married a second.
His sabbatical exhausted, Mr. Pomije worked after hours each night redoing his work over a period of two months. He finished shortly before the October 10 deadline and collected his Ph.D. in December 1968. Days later, some boys found the original dissertation waterlogged in a culvert.
“I couldn’t even stand to reopen the thing,” says Mr. Pomije. “I never did. I didn’t want to even look at it.”
Close Call
Timothy Snyder is a Yale University historian and the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Eighteen years ago, his promising young career was nearly derailed when a thief grabbed a black leather backpack containing Mr. Snyder’s jacket, his Macintosh laptop, and the three floppy disks onto which he had backed up all of his dissertation research.
“Getting your dissertation sold for crack—it doesn’t happen to everybody,” he remarks.
A doctoral student at the University of Oxford at the time, Mr. Snyder had just wrapped up his archival research in Poland and returned to the United States to attend his brother Phil’s graduation from Yale.
That weekend, as the family moved Phil’s belongings out of his campus apartment, their mother recorded the memory on a bulky video camera. In one sweeping panoramic shot, the Snyders would notice later, the likely culprit walks slowly across the bustling campus green, appearing “kind of spaced out and sort of looking around.”
When Timothy Snyder returned to the room for another armload, he suddenly realized that his leather backpack was missing. Knowing that the thief’s trail was still fresh, the two older brothers raced off in opposite directions, adrenaline surging, while the youngest, Mike, called the police.
“The reptilian part of my brain was thinking, ‘I’m going to find this guy, and I’m going to jump on him,’” Mr. Snyder recalls. “‘I’m going to get this thing back.’”
His frontal lobe, however, approached the predicament more reasonably, calculating that he might have to redo three years of research but that he could probably accomplish it in two. Such a move, he knows, would have altered not only the dissertation but the course of his life as well.
Luckily for him, when he returned to the apartment, a police officer was standing there with his computer. After getting Mr. Snyder’s mother to agree that her goal was to recover the pack, not prosecute the thief, the officer had driven her to a nearby pawnshop. Mr. Snyder recounted the scene there in a memorable essay for the History News Network in 2005:
Though scarcely 20 minutes had passed since the theft, my computer was there on a shelf. “Oh,” said my mother to the proprietor, “how much do you want for that computer?” He said he had paid $50 for it. Then she asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have a backpack, would you?” The proprietor produced mine from under the counter, saying that someone who owed him $20 had given it to him as payment. Then my mother looked him up and down. “Nice coat,” said she. He said she could have it for another $20. My mother redeemed my scholarly future (and my Banana Republic weekend jacket) for 90 bucks in a pawnshop.
Mr. Snyder says that on the drive out of New Haven, his father “began to wonder aloud about the arrangement between the police and the pawnshops.”
If there were a hall of fame for anecdotes about dissertation-research theft, Anjali Adukia’s would be there. Her story is so colorful and so unlikely that Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education asked her to re-enact it for a campy video.
Ms. Adukia, who is working on her doctorate in education at Harvard, had been trying for about a year to get a government agency in India to send her a key data set about Indian schools. Finally, in the summer of 2007, she traveled in person to the agency where, after a weeklong wait, she was handed a DVD containing the information.
Unfortunately, she was headed further into the field—to a rural area in the western state of Gujarat—and lacked the resources to immediately make a copy of the disk.
And so it was that Ms. Adukia found herself walking along a path with the prized DVD in one hand and a banana in the other.
“Suddenly I felt this tug at my left hand,” she says, “and then, whoosh! This monkey grabs the DVD and takes off running.”
Ms. Adukia, who chased and swore at the thieving monkey, says that while she is not a fast runner, she has developed a decent throwing arm as a member of her school’s “Ed Sox” softball team.
“I realized I had something in my right hand, the banana,” she says. “So I chucked it and hit [the monkey] square in the back.”
The confused animal dropped the DVD, scooped up the banana, and fled.
The Gandhi ashram was nearby, and Ms. Adukia felt a momentary pang of guilt at having assaulted a monkey so near to a shrine honoring a man of peace.
But as she considered how close she had come to losing a vital piece of her research, Ms. Adukia knew that she had merely done what every scholar must, at some point: She had just defended her dissertation.
