An engineering notebook would have helped.
Amen to that. I was a young, niave biophysicist grad student. I’d already been exposed at the sidelines to academic fraud which probably cost my mentor a Nobel (look up Summerlin & Sloan-Kettering) I reported to R. A. Good..
I was newly graduated from high school at the time and on an American Heart Assoc. research fellowship. Later went to college, then the military, then to grad school.
Fellow grad students (mostly EEs) were using engineering notebooks.. Everything was documented. Seemd crazy at the time because I saved computer code, photos, and a decent lab notebook. You name it.
After graduation I went into academia, then industry. Intellectual property attorneys quickly noted that a full-blown engineering notebook was THE solution.
My only complaint? 39 years later! My budget for good ink pens remains outrageous.