I have misgivings about wading into Crackergate — indeed, even about dipping my toe into the edge of the pool (which is all I’m promising here) — but here goes.
First, let me commend the thoughtful posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and John Wilkins on the issue. If you haven’t read them yet, read them now. (If you’ve already read them, read them again.)
Next, let me set forth the disclaimers that I’d hope would be obvious:
Category Archives: Current events
Considering an ethicist’s ‘questionable behavior’.
The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee’s departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article “An Unethical Ethicist?” What more fitting fall than some self-appointed morality cop going down on account of his own immoral dealings?
Believe me, I’m familiar with the suspicions people seem to harbor that ethicists are, in fact, twice as naughty as other folks. But from the evidence laboriously assembled in the SciAm article, I’m just not buying the picture of McGee laughing maniacally while twirling his mustache and plotting all manner of evil. (To be fair, despite the headline, I don’t think the SciAm piece is arguing that McGee is a villain, either.) Rather, I’m inclined to think that he made a few bad calls, but that the most likely explanation for his departure is good old fashioned academic politics.
It’s news that a teenager is skeptical?
I heard a piece by David Kestenbaum on NPR’s “Morning Edition” that hasn’t been sitting right with me. You, dear readers, get to help me figure out what’s bugging me about the story, a profile of 16-year-old climate skeptic Kristen Byrnes.
Movie screening expulsion: whose hearts and minds are up for grabs?
Maybe you heard the news that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins went to a screening of the documentary Expelled! in Minneapolis, except that, because he was recognized, PZ Myers was barred from the screening (despite having signed up ahead of time like the other attendees). Here’s the New York Times story, and Greg Laden has collected roughly a bajillion links to blog posts in the aftermath of the incident. The big debate seems to be whether Myers ought to have brought attention to the fact that he was barred from the screening, or whether he should have just gotten a haircut at the mall to pass the time until it was over.
If the science pipeline breaks, the rest of us get hurt, too.
A bunch of other bloggers are discussing the recent statement A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk (PDF). I thought I’d say something about the complexities of the situation, and about why non-scientists (whose tax dollars support scientific research funded by the NIH and other government agencies) should care.
The general idea behind funding scientific research with public monies is that such research is expected to produce knowledge that will benefit society. There are problems that non-scientists cannot solve on their own, so we pony up the resources so that scientists can apply their expertise to solving them. As we’ve discussed before, tax-payers seem most interested in the payoff of the research — the knowledge with practical application.
But you can’t get that payoff without scientists.
How committed are paleontologists to objectivity (in questions of ethical conduct)?
There’s another development in Aetogate, which you’ll recall saw paleontologists William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz alleging that Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were making use of their work or fossil resources without giving them proper credit. Since I last posted on the situation, NMMNHS decided to convene an ethics panel to consider the allegations. This ought to be good news, right?
It probably depends on what one means by “consider”.
A tangle of controversy — and a plea to start untangling.
You’ve probably heard that UCLA scientist Edythe London, whose house was earlier vandalized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by animal rights activists, has once again been targeted. This time an incendiary device was left on her front door.
Abel and Mark weighed in on this appalling use of tactics to terrorize a scientist doing work on approved protocols — protocols that had to meet the stringent standards imposed by federal regulations. But while the NIH and the odd newspaper columnist stands up to make the case for animal use in medical research and against the violent intimidation of medical researchers, there seems not to be much in the way of public outcry.
Do people really feel like firebombing is a legitimate means of persuasion?
My guess is that they don’t. However, some of the details of the situation as described in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times may explain why the public is conflicted. Beyond animal use, the area of London’s research and the source of her funding seem to be raising discomfort, creating a tangled knot of controversy that’s begging to be untangled.
Super Bowl parties, double dipping, and strategies for emerging alive.
Via Greg Laden, I see that there is now some research to support our primal revulsion toward double-dippers:
Way to represent your professional community, dude!
In response to my earlier post on the allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, a reader sent me a message posted to a public mailing list of vertebrate paleontologists. The message gives a glimpse of an attitude toward others in one’s professional community that, frankly, I find appalling, so I’m going to give you my dissection of it.
Please note that the quoted passages below comprise the entire post to the mailing list, save for the poster’s (presumably real) name, which I’m excising because I’m not sure I want Google to link him in perpetuity with an attitude that he may grow out of.
Peer reviewer behaving badly (and why it matters).
Revere already flagged this story, but I’m going to try to move beyond the forehead slapping to some analysis of why a journal’s confidentiality rules might matter. (I’ll leave it to Bill, Bora, Jean-Claude, and their posse to explain how a thoroughgoing shift to “open science” might make such situations go away.)
The story, as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is that a peer reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, reviewing a manuscript that reported negative findings about the safety of a diabetes drug, broke confidentiality rules and sent a copy of that soon-to-be-published manuscript to the drug’s manufacturer: