Stories like that are so depressing. I can't say leaving is a bad choice. There are still some good people in there interested in science, at the moment, but I wonder what is coming in the future when those become fewer and the corrupting influences take greater hold. I wish there were some alternatives, outside of the academy, for people to get started in a biology-related career. It's tough now because of the expectation of slaving away at PhD and postdoc positions. For now I'm skeptical that going to industry first gives enough opportunities to lead to a position for much innovation, unfortunately.

Our stories are more similar than you thought. In my role as a finisher, I first started using the lines then got the "bad" (real) results, then found they had mycoplasma (and not just for that project, it was every single line in the lab, which they kept using). Unfortunately, the PI, and member who had been working on the project a while, thought that the mycoplasma was the explanation for the bad results so they wasted more resources on it. Also, it was the same situation. There was almost no one formally trained on the basics and the PI traveled non-stop and rarely ran the lab, beyond pressuring everyone to have good results from afar.