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The incentives of academia seem near-perfectly configured to encourage running the programme.
Overstretched early-career academics running out of grant money and desperate for promising preliminary results now because if they don't meet the grant application deadline they're gonna get fired from their moderate-status job? When running the programme gives you a 90% chance of good results and a 0.1% chance of killing everyone, and you know that every other overstretched researcher in the world will be facing the same dilemma eventually (making it a stochastic certainty that someone will run the program)... well, it may as well be you, at least you won't have to live the Last Days of Mankind with low-status.
The way you say "status" makes it sound as if it were a matter of petty vanity, but as I have found out through accidental A/B testing, in the city I am currently in, a lone early-30s guy with a Russian name can't even get housing without prominently displaying that he works for a university. When you are a beggar (in the sense that your ability to enter economic relationships necessary for basic survival depends on the goodwill of strangers), status is rather existential; and most academics probably can't even conceive of life as anything other than a beggar, because we live by begging for housing, admission, publication, and grant money, and even if we choose to leave academia the first step to be surmounted is that you have to beg a corporation for a job, or a VC for funding, or an indifferent public to buy your startup's product.
Have you tried changing some of the vowels so it sounds Ukrainian?
Do you really think the ordinary westerner knows the difference between Russian and Ukrainian dialects?
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The heuristic is: If I heard the name growing up, it's Russian. If it sounds like a name I heard growing up, but the letters are different, it's Ukrainian.
I suspect this is pretty close to what people are doing, even if they don't realize it.
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