Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you’re doing science. There’s a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it’s rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren’t completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers they hope someday to join (nor from the learning community of which they’re already a part).
But even these four meetings seem like a lot of time compared to the research ethics session I have facilitated the past couple summers (and will facilitate again this summer) for undergraduates doing summer research internships at one of the local private-sector centers of science and engineering. There, I get a whopping 90 minutes with the students.
With that kind of time pressure, you start stripping off the bells and whistles to locate the core message you want to get across. The core message, as I see it, is after the jump.
You’re here to learn something about how to be a scientist and how to do real research. I’m guessing that what brought you to science was a fascination with the universe and its workings, a curiosity about how things fit together. Science is about looking at phenomena really carefully and building reliable accounts of what they do or how they work. It’s about building knowledge.
It’s a big universe, and building scientific knowledge takes the labor of a lot of people. Since you’re all trying to get accurate knowledge, everyone has to be really careful to report observations accurately and not to leave out potentially important details.
You have to be honest.
It’s hard to build accurate accounts on the basis of inaccurate information. And, you need to be able to trust the other people engaged in the process of doing science. If you can’t trust them, their contributions are of no use to you, and you’re left trying to do the whole job yourself.
Practices that undercut the honesty necessary to build scientific knowledge are bad for science. If you’re for science, you should understand that these practices, and the people who follow them, are hurting something you care about.
The people who do some of these things — who massage their data almost past recognition, or report measurements they haven’t made yet but are sure they will see soon — usually think they have good reasons. They need to show results to get the grant that will let them do more research. They need to get a few more publications so they can secure the job that will keep them in science.
But as soon as they decide that dishonesty is acceptable to achieve their immediate goals, they have given up on the goal of science. If you’re really committed to the project of building a reliable body of scientific knowledge, you can’t lie about the science you’re doing.
What about the pressures — the competition for grants, for jobs, for the acclaim that comes from making a discovery first — that make it seem like a good idea to be less-than-fully-honest to the other people doing science? If those pressures make it harder for scientists to be honest with each other about the phenomena and the experiments, they are bad for science.
If you’re really serious about science, there is a joy in the discovery of something new that doesn’t go away if you find out later that someone else got there first. The joy is in finding out something you didn’t know already about how the world works. The goal is to build a shared body of knowledge that makes us all smarter. If the individual competitions make us lose sight of that goal in the process of trying to establish our own bragging rights, they are bad for science.
You should never, ever, let them convince you to participate in practices that hurt the thing you care about. Hurting science doesn’t just suck the fun out of doing science, but it leaves everyone with a body of claims that can’t be counted on to be knowledge.
As you travel through the community of science, you’ll look around and notice people doing all sorts of things that run counter to the goal of building good scientific knowledge. It may be tempting to sigh and say, well, that’s how it is — people will do what they can to get an advantage, and I just have to live with it.
Don’t do that. That’s giving control of the community to the people who have lost sight of what science is all about. Honesty and ethical practice matter a lot because without them the community can’t build a body of reliable knowledge. And if you have to spend all your time worried about people who are cheating — and worried about the “findings” they’re putting into the shared knowledge pool — that cuts into the time you have to enjoy solving problems, discovering something new, and getting a better understanding of how things work.
Instead of shrugging your shoulders and letting bad behavior go, remind people why it matters. Remind yourself why it matters. If you’re committed to science, you’re also committed to calling out the people who would hurt it for their own advantage.
Related posts:
Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.
Getting ethics to catch on with scientists.
This may be a little off-topic, but I was wondering if you read this article in Science, beginning of abstract pasted below.
In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned to continued institutional care or to placement in foster care, and their cognitive development was tracked through 54 months of age.
Rather horrifying! Can you imagine this experiment being performed in a first- (or second-)world country in the 21st century? But the title of the paper is:
Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project
Is it now OK to perform this experimental intervention, since it’s in Romania? The same issue of Science includes a policy Forum article:
The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children.
Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Science 21 December 2007: 1874-1875.
Research with abandoned children does not necessarily involve exploitation.
Any thoughts?
The authors of the study, Nelson et al., do have a lengthy discussion of ethical issues within the paper (e.g., the secretary of state for child protection in Romania invited them to do the study, the IRBs at Minnesota, Tulane, and Maryland [PI home institutions] approved the study, etc.). However, to me it seems to set off alarm bells in terms of ethics. I’m definitely not a developmental psychologist, but this statement seems odd:
Clinical equipoise is the notion that there must be uncertainty in the expert community about the relative merits of experimental and control interventions such that no subject should be randomized to an intervention known to be inferior to the standard of care (27). Because of the uncertainty in the results of prior research [??], it had not been established unequivocally that foster care was superior to institutionalized care across all domains of functioning… [Is the superiority of foster care really in doubt?]
How about…
“You have a much better chance of keeping any job you get when you’re honest.”
Short, direct, and it appeals to the capitalist in us all.
How about…
“You have a much better chance of keeping any job you get when you’re honest.”
Short, direct, and it appeals to the capitalist in us all.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | January 9, 2008 12:40 AM
Ya, I agree with Alan. It’s nice to try to be ethical. It’s polite and easier on the conscience! It is also good to be afraid of not being ethical. The old, you reap what you sow has a way of coming up and biting you if you aren’t careful! LOL!
Dave Briggs :~)
What about the pressures — the competition for grants, for jobs, for the acclaim that comes from making a discovery first — that make it seem like a good idea to be less-than-fully-honest to the other people doing science? If those pressures make it harder for scientists to be honest with each other about the phenomena and the experiments, they are bad for science.
This is a pragmatic point, not a philosophical one, but it would be good for young researchers to learn much earlier on that worrying about priority is largely a waste of time. Grad students vastly exaggerate the degree to which anyone else is interested in their project (usually minimal) and the importance of publishing a month before someone else (usually none). Unfortunately, PI’s have a vested interest in encouraging those exaggerations.
“You have a much better chance of keeping any job you get when you’re honest.”
While that may be true, you’re not getting that job in the first place without the papers that might require a bit of trimming here and there. Unfortunately, I don’t think a strict game theory analysis favors going down with the ship of scrupulosity.
I suppose this wasn’t the first topic that came to my mind in science ethics – I would normally first think of the ethics of how one treats research subjects.
But the ethics of how one treats the knowledge-production system is of course much more central to science as a whole.
A further sort of ethical worry is one I’ve thought of because of the materials my boyfriend uses in his lab. Since we all ought to be concerned both with global climate change and depletion of scarce resources, when is it ethical to do experiments that use lots of liquid helium (say), which is both running out, and needs large amounts of (generally greenhouse-gas producing) energy to maintain?
That’s the short version?
As always, you get us thinking so thanks for that.
In my usual vein, I want to know where we differentiate between minor deviations from “ScienceMethod101” and worrisome ethical lapses.
Of course, it got a bit long.
These are all things we should do. But it’s always more interesting to examine real world problems. Do you have any examples?
Data should never be falsified. But what about selective data presentation? For example, doctors presenting the best results from clinical studies to emphasize particular aspects a study. Is this OK to an extent? Does the ‘line that should not be crossed’ lie at the point where the presentation becomes misleading?
At what point does it become certain (and therefore wrong) that what you do hurts the integrity of science? I can think of many issues that are not clear cut.
What if it is certain that what you are doing is wrong, but the impact of it will at most, be trivial? Consider this question if you have a mortgage payment that is approaching foreclosure because your twins were born prematurely and your health insurance was crappy because you were a poor grad student.
I don’t really think the title of this post is appropriate. Once you start lying, it isn’t science any more. It is politics or entertainment, or sports, or war, or theft or some other human endeavor. It isn’t science. The problem is that lying in politics or theft works and politicians who lie often become highly successful, as are con artists who lie. Wakefield, the man who lied about finding measles vaccine virus in the gut of children with autism, has been richly rewarded monetarily for his lies.
Ethics in science is about doing science in an ethical way. One could do scientific experiments on humans without their consent. It would be science, provided one was honest and accurate in doing the experiments. It wouldn’t be ethical science unless the participants had given informed consent and the experiment was non-exploitive.
In the above example of Romanian abandoned children, was the research ethical? If the best treatment is only available in limited supply, is it the responsibility of scientists doing research to make up any shortfall in a treatment leg found to be deficient? If it is, then any research into comparing two treatment modalities much have sufficient funding to supply the superior treatment modality to all participants as soon as the study shows one treatment to be superior to some confidence level. In the case of foster care for orphans, I suspect the limiting factor is the availability of foster care, not necessarily funding, but no doubt more foster care would be available if there was more funding. Is it the responsibility of the scientists doing the research to provide each participant with foster care as soon as the researchers knew it was the superior treatment?
A factor that has affected research on HIV prevention is a demand that all subjects in the trial that become HIV positive be supplied with standard of care treatment in perpetuity. The cost of this treatment has the potential to exceed all other costs in performing a trial by a large margin.
There was a recent study that showed that people without health insurance have worse health than people with health insurance. Not a surprising finding. Are the researchers who found that result then obligated to provide health insurance to those participants who lack it? For how long?
Is it ethical to do research if all participants cannot be given the superior treatment if the trial finds one leg to be obviously superior? Is it ethical to leave the answers to such treatment questions unknown?
Politicians have claimed that everyone in the US does have health care. Bush has said they can simply go to an emergency room and be treated. Without research showing this to be a lie, it simply goes unchallenged. If any research into this question required all uninsured participants to be given health insurance for a year, the cost would be on the order of $15,000 per uninsured participant. A study with a few hundred participants would cost a few million dollars. Should an IRB block such a study unless the proposers have sufficient funding to grant each participant health insurance for a year?
Neurocritic, your comment is a bit off-topic since that isn’t the category of ethics under consideration, but so answer your question, some orphans have wretched experiences in foster care. And anecdotally at least my impression is that the lower end of foster care is in most developed nations lower than the lower end of institutions. So yes, this is a legitimate matter to study. Furthermore, there are very often insufficient foster care options to stick every kid in foster care even assuming that is better. So some amount of randomization to decide which are going into foster care isn’t unreasonable once foster care is a scarce commodity. I can see why this would raise ethical red flags, but it looks like it might be ok. (I have additional concerns about consent issues but if the original institutions consented that might be enough)
We don’t learn “Ethics in Science” in Malaysia, though I’d really love to attend such courses, especially because my M.Sc. revolves around live animals (river terrapins).
In my undergraduate days, I have encountered a couple of coursemates who cheated their findings “so that their results could be more easily discussed”. As a student, I shunned them, and I promised myself to interfere if any of them decided to pursue their M.Sc. (but thank God they all got other jobs after graduation) because I believed that wasn’t the correct way of doing Science.