Ethical research

The New York Times has taken notice of the history and philosophy of chemistry in a small piece about a new book, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Significance by Eric R. Scerri. In particular, the Times piece notes the issue of whether Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was "borrowing" from the work of others (without acknowledging that he had done so) when he put forward his version of the periodic table of the elements: The first [of six scientists who formulated periodic tables before Mendeleev] was a French geologist named Alexandre Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, but his publisher was…
Yesterday, I recalled MIT's dismissal of one of its biology professors for fabrication and falsification, both "high crimes" in the world of science. Getting caught doing these is Very Bad for a scientist -- which makes the story of Luk Van Parijs all the more puzzling. As the story unfolded a year ago, the details of the investigation suggested that at least some of Van Parijs lies may have been about details that didn't matter so much -- which means he was taking a very big risk for very little return. Here's what I wrote then: The conduct of fired MIT biology professor Luk Van Parijs, as…
Just over a year ago, MIT fired an associate professor of biology for fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct always incurs my ire, one of the things that struck me when the sad story of Luk Van Parijs broke was how well all the other parties in the affair -- from the MIT administrators right down to the other members of the Van Parijs lab -- acquitted themselves in a difficult situation. Here's what I wrote when the story broke last year: Can you believe there's another story in the news about a scientist caught fabricating and falsifying data? Also, the sky is blue.…
I am, as usual, late to the party reacting to the news that UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach has given up research on primates owing to "pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project". As reported by Inside Higher Ed: Ringach's name and home phone number are posted on the Primate Freedom Project's Web site, and colleagues and UCLA officials said that Ringach was harassed by phone -- his office phone number is no longer active -- and e-mail, as well as through demonstrations in front of his home. In an e-mail this month to several anti-animal…
Regular commenter and tireless gadfly Bill Hooker asks what my take is on the movement afoot to get academics to put pressure on (and perhaps completely boycott) scientific/technical/medical publisher and information portal Reed-Elsevier. What's wrong with Reed-Elsevier? Among other things, they host "arms fairs" -- like book fairs, but with munitions and torture equipment (which means it's unlikely Scholastic will be hosting an arms fair at the local primary school). But hey, are we expecting a company to be able to stay afloat on revenues from academic and technical publishing alone? I'…
From time to time I get emails asking for advice dealing with situations that just don't feel right. Recently, I've been asked about the following sort of situation: You're an undergraduate who has landed an internship in a lab that does research in the field you're hoping to pursue in graduate school. As so often happens in these situations, you're assigned to assist an advanced graduate student who is gearing up to write a dissertation. First assignment: hit the library and write a literature review of the relevant background literature for the research project. You find articles. You…
At the request of femalechemist, I'm going to revisit the Sames/Sezen controversy. You'll recall that Dalibor Sames, a professor at Columbia University, retracted seven papers on which he was senior author. Bengu Sezen, also an author on each of the retracted papers and a graduate of the Sames lab, performed the experiments in question. Sames says he retracted the papers because the current members of his lab could not reproduce the original findings. Sezen says that the experiments reported worked for her and for other experimenters in the Sames lab. Moreover, she says that Sames did not…
The Ask a ScienceBlogger question of the week is: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to? On the technical end of things, I suppose I'm a bit surprised at how challenging it has been to clone certain mammals successfully, but getting things to work in the lab is almost always harder than figuring out whether they're possible in theory. I expected, of course, that some would want to try cloning humans and that others would declare that cloning of humans should be completely off limits. But as…
I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can't tell you how happy I am that they're even including ethics training in this program. Anyway, one of the students asked a really good question, which I thought I'd share: Let's say you discover that a published result is irreproducible. Who do you tell? My answer after the jump. First, of course you want to make sure you've done all the things…
I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do. My sense is that at least part of what's going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it…
There's a nice commentary in the most recent issue of Cell about scientists' apparent aversion to thinking about ethics, and the reasons they give for thinking about other things instead. You may not be able to get to the full article via the link (unless, say, you're hooked up to a library with an institutional subscription to Cell), but BrightSurf has a brief description of it. And, of course, I'm going to say a bit about it here. The author of the commentary, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, identifies seven main reasons scientists give for not thinking about ethics…
From The New York Times: A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers. The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory. It's a problem if published experiments are not reproducible -- but what kind of problem it is might not be clear yet. Sometimes experiments aren't reproducible because they didn't really happen (i.e., the results are fabricated), but sometimes they aren'…
Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves -- with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments. Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical. Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in…
Do you ever feel like hearing me rattle on instead of just reading it? Here's your chance! You can listen to the first episode of the ScienceBlogs podcast, in which I speak with Katherine Sharpe about the evils of plagiarism (among other misdeeds) in the world of science.
My favorite T-shirt says "I [heart] irony. It's a great shirt, because no one can be absolutely sure that I love irony. Maybe I'm ambivalent about irony and I'm wearing the shirt ... ironically. Despite what the Ethan Hawke character in Reality Bites may have said, irony is not as straightforward as meaning the opposite of the literal meaning of the words you are uttering. Rather, it's meaning something that is some distance from what those words mean -- a distance that some in your audience may be able to decipher, but that others may miss altogether. What, you may be asking yourself,…
Today at Inside Higher Education, an article identifies "The Real Science Ethics Issues". Which means, I suppose, you don't have to keep taking my word about what's an issue and what is not. The focus of the article is not on the flashier instances of fraud, but on more mundane stuff that may rot the scientific enterprise from the inside. From the article: Nicholas H. Steneck, a University of Michigan history professor and a consultant at the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that most research fabrication is "not very subtle or clever."…
Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin lays into climate scientist Richard Lindzen. His post begins with reasons one might be inclined to take Lindzen's views seriously: Unlike nearly all "sceptics", he's a real climate scientist who has done significant research on climate change, and, also unlike most of them, there's no evidence that he has a partisan or financial axe to grind. But then, we find the 2001 Newsweek interview that gives Quiggin reason for pause: Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks…
In most cases, scientific disagreements are resolved in the labs, at conferences, or in exchanges in journals. Sometimes the disagreements are drawn out, sometimes feelings are hurt, but it hardly ever comes to a defamation suit. Someone forgot to send John Lott the memo. From the Chicago Tribune: John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U[niversity] of C[hicago] visiting professor, alleges that [Steven] Levitt defamed him in the book ["Freakonomics"] by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime.…
As expected, Derek Lowe has a thoughful post (with a very interesting discussion going on in the comments) about the latest "Expression of Concern" from the New England Journal of Medicine about the VIGOR Vioxx trial. To catch you up if you've been watching curling rather than following the case: A clinical study of Vioxx was performed, resulting in a manuscript submitted to NEJM by 13 authors (11 academics and two scientists employed by Merck). The study was looking at whether adverse gastrointestinal events were correlated to taking Vioxx. During the course of the study, other events in…
Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there's a piece on Gerald Schatten's role in the Korean stem cell mess. It's an interesting piece, written without Dr. Schatten's participation -- he's keeping quiet while the University of Pittsburgh conducts its investigation of him. (Worth noting, from the article: "Pittsburgh began investigating Mr. Schatten, at his own request, with a six-person panel that first met on December 14.") Given Schatten's non-participation in the article, the portrait of him that emerges turns on the impressions of his friends and acquaintances, past collaborators…