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?
Category Archives: Ethical research
Trusting other scientists (Sames-Sezen follow-up).
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 contact her about any problems reproducing the results, and that he asked the journals to retract the papers without letting her know he was doing so.
I am not now, nor was I ever, an organic chemist, so I’m not going to try to do the experiments myself (repeatedly, with appropriate consultation of the people who developed the original protocols) to see who’s right. That’s not the kind of light I can shed on this case. However, I can break down the key issues at play here:
Most of the ethical questions raised by cloning were already with us.
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 far as the discussions of the ethics of cloning go, I expected that more people would recognize that many of the ethical worries that flow from cloning were already with us.
Practical advice: irreproducibility.
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.
Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.
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 harder to get what those business types call “buy-in” from the scientists.
“Ethics, schmethics! Can’t I just think about science?”
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.
Reproducibility and retracted papers.
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.
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.
Authorship, guests, and irony.
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, does this have to do with the issue of authorship of scientific papers?