An important part of the practice of science is not just the creation of knowledge but also the transmission of that knowledge. Knowledge that’s stuck in your head or lab notebooks doesn’t do anyone else any good. So, scientists are supposed to spread the knowledge through means such as peer reviewed scientific journals. And, scientists are supposed to do their level best to make sure the findings they report are honest and accurate.
Sometimes, scientists screw up. Ideally, scientists who have screwed up in a scientific communication need to set the record straight. Just what is involved in setting the record straight, however, sometimes presents interesting problems, as the following case illustrates nicely.
Category Archives: Misconduct
Unpacking Nature’s ‘Where are they now?’
Abi at nanopolitan nudged me to have a look at Nature‘s recent article on what has become of targets of recent scientific fraud investigations. He notes that, interspersed with a whole bunch of poster boys for how not to do science, there are at least a couple folks who were cleared of wrongdoing (or whose investigations are still ongoing) which seems, to put it mildly, not the nicest way for Nature to package their stories.
So, I’m going to repackage them slightly and add my own comments. (All direct quotations are from the Nature article.)
Why do scientists lie? (More reminiscing about Luk Van Parijs.)
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:
What ever happened to Luk Van Parijs?
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:
So much to blog about, so little time!
Things have been busy here, but there are some interesting stories I’ve been watching that I thought I should mention (as well as the usual fodder for rants, and a cartoon series that might be funny, if it’s not just seriously twisted):
Advice: “Am I enabling plagiarism?”
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 read. You summarize and evaluate and analyze, over the course of many pages.
What you write is good. Not only is it praised, but it is incorporated — in some cases, word for word — into the chapter the grad student is writing.
Uh oh.
You know (because you have been told) that just doing this kind of literature review wouldn’t be enough to make you an author of any published paper that comes from this research, but your gut tells you there’s something not quite right about the situation. And, another researcher in the lab is taken aback to learn that what you have written is being used this way. In fact, the graduate student’s supervisor makes it clear that your words can’t be used verbatim in the thesis or any manuscripts to be submitted for publication; the wording will have to be reworked.
Are you enabling misconduct? Are you being taken advantage of? And, given that you’re being asked to do some more literature reviews, what do you do now?
Don’t do the misconduct if you can’t do the time.
A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He’s no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the “preliminary studies” sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments.
Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will be doing some time for his crimes. From the Burlington Free Press:
Philanthropy gets ugly, as the script for a Sb/DonorsChoose attack ad is discovered.
I should have known it would come to this.
A week into our ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for schools, the warm spirit of pan-science-harmony has started to erode.
An anonymous source has come into possession of the text of an attack ad targeting our biological brethren and sistern. I hate to even give a story like this oxygen, but in the interests of full disclosure, I reproduce the ad below the fold.
Advice on protecting your intellectual property.
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 circumstances in which the person whose intellectual labor is being stolen doesn’t have as much power as the people stealing it (or at least complicit in its theft). What this means is that one sometimes has to choose between taking a stand to expose unethical behavior and having a future in science. (One’s supervisor, after all, can determine whether one’s current position continues or ends abruptly, and that supervisor writes the letters upon which one depends to find future positions.)
What’s a scientist to do when facing this kind of snake pit?
Plagiarism and Podcasts.
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.