professional ethics
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007On Abel's post on conscience clauses, Bob Koepp left this comment:
It's a pretty warped understanding of professionalism that would require professionals to violate their own sincere ethical beliefs. After all, someone lacking personal integrity probably isn't going to be much concerned with professional integrity. "You can trust me because I lack the strength of my convictions."
I think the connection between personal integrity and professional integrity is an important one, so here are some preliminary thoughts on it.
Joining a profession requires some buy-in to the shared values of that…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007Abel at Terra Sigillata has a post about coscience clauses for pharmacists that's worth a read. In it, he takes issue with the stand of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a professional pharmacy organization, recognizing "a pharmacist's right to decline to participate in therapies that he or she finds morally, religiously, or ethically troubling" while supporting "the establishment of systems that protect the patient's right to obtain legally prescribed and medically indicated treatments while reasonably accommodating in a nonpunitive manner the pharmacist's right of…
jstemwedel | January 24, 2007ACS LiveWire is hosting a "blogversation" (don't shoot me, I didn't coin it!) about nanoscience and nanotechnology. Here are the panelists:
Rudy Baum is the Editor-in-Chief of Chemical & Engineering News.
David M. Berube is author of Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz and the Nano-Hype blog . He is a Professor of Speech Communication Studies and Government-Industry Coordinator of Nanoscience and Technology Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Richard A. L. Jones is author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life and the Soft Machines blog . He is Professor of…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2006You may remember the plight of the Tripoli Six (also known as the Benghazi Six), the physician and five nurses on trial in Libya for infecting 400 children in the hospital where they were working with HIV even though there is overwhelming evidence that the most likely route of infection was poor hospital hygeine, probably before any of these six health care workers even set foot in Libya. (Nature provides details of the scientific analysis of the evidence in this PDF.)
While the public outcry from the scientific community in support of the Tripoli Six has been great, those watching the trial…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2006Just a little more follow-up on the Karpova-Tonegawa dust-up at MIT:
First, the report from the Ad Hoc Committee at MIT was posted on November 2 ... but apparently has been removed:
The ad hoc committee is currently receiving comments on the report that it issued on November 2, 2006 and pending its consideration of the comments it receives, the Committee has asked that the report be taken off the website temporarily.
I have a PDF of the report as originally posted, and am curious about how whatever the committee ends up reposting will differ from what I have. However, I'm not sure if I ought…
jstemwedel | October 14, 2006As Revere notes, the trial of the Tripoli six is scheduled to resume on October 31. This means the time for serious action is now.
As Mike Dunford points out,
If you want to do something more than just get mad, if you want to try to change things, you will need to do more than read blog articles and post comments. You need to write people. You need to call people. You need to send faxes and emails.
Honest to goodness, a letter on paper, in an envelope, addressed and stamped to get to its destination, is going to signal that this really matters to you in a way that emails will not -- because…
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*:
I've heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which "plagiarism" as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I'm suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, "…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2006In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn't raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:
The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. ...
During the first trial [in 2004], the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome's Tor Vergata University, to examine the…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them.
So, I'll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed.
Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee.
Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television…
jstemwedel | July 30, 2006Judging from some of the comments on my latest post about the Tonegawa/Karpova kerfuffle, it's clear that there is not consensus about precisely what relationship a scientist should pursue (or avoid pursuing) with another scientist working on similar research. Part of the disagreement may come down to a difference of opinion about how important it is for scientists to share knowledge relative to protecting their own interests in the hyper-competitive world of academic science. Another part of the disagreement may come down to standards of similarity (i.e., when can we say that project X and…
jstemwedel | July 28, 2006Three Bulls is on top of this, but I want to add a few comments of my own (as is my habit).
The story about Susumu Tonegawa sinking MIT's attempt to hire Alla Karpova is not over yet. Sure, the Boston Globe (and the MIT News Office) report that MIT has formed a committee to try to get its neuroscientists to collaborate with each other better. But it looks like they've got their work cut out for them, judging by the email exchange between Tonegawa and Karpova, obtained by the Globe.
On the surface, the emails sound respectful, maybe even friendly. But, anyone who's been in the snakepit that…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2006Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves -- paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn't seem to…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2006While I hope this hurricane season is a lot less eventful than the last one, it's always good to be ready. To that end, I'm brushing off (and bringing together here) two "classic" posts from the 2005 hurricane season.
As we look to the scientists to tell us what nature may have in store for us, we need to remember how scientists think about uncertainties -- and especially, how important it is to a scientist to avoid going with predictions that have a decent chance of being false. Being wrong may seem almost as bad to the scientist as being under 10 feet of water.
Meanwhile, the scientists…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2006Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry.
Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article:
Just over a year ago, Cambridge's prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project,…
jstemwedel | April 23, 2006Over 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…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2006The last two meetings of my ethics in science class have focused on some of the history of research with human subjects and on the changing statements of ethical principles or rules governing such experimentation. Looking at these statements (the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report especially) against the backdrop of some very serious missteps (Nazi medical experiments and the Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis experiment), it's painfully clear how much regulation is scandal-driven -- a reaction to a screw-up, rather than something that researchers took the time to think about…
jstemwedel | March 13, 2006When I was a kid, my mother went back to school with the intention of getting the physics training she needed to pursue her dream of a career in astronomy. Part of this journey, of course, required that she be plunged into the life of a graduate student. It wasn't any prettier then than it is now.
While my mom was in the thick of the horrors visited upon graduate students, she was a little bit freaked out by coverage of a parole hearing for one Theodore Streleski, an erstwhile math graduate student at Stanford who killed his advisor with a ball peen hammer. Streleski actually refused…
jstemwedel | March 2, 2006(Apologies to John Hodgman for swiping his nifty title.)
There has been some discussion in these parts about just who ought to be allowed to talk about scientific issues of various sorts, and just what kind of authority we ought to grant such talk. It's well and good to say that a journalism major who never quite finished his degree is less of an authority on matters cosmological than a NASA scientist, but what should we say about engineers or medical doctors with "concerns" about evolutionary theory? What about the property manager who has done a lot of reading? How important is all that…