Category Archives: Ethical research

Senior scientists, give us some good news!

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Yesterday I published a post with suggestions for ways junior scientists could offer some push-back to ethical shenanigans by senior scientists in their field. While admittedly all of these were “baby-steps” kind of measures, the reactions in the comments are conveying a much grimmer picture of scientific communities than one usually gets talking to senior scientists in person. For example:

[N]one of your suggestions above would work. Those are all things that we tried. But when the people in a position to do something about it are being rewarded either by their silence or by their complicity, all of the things you suggest have effects ranging from nothing to career suicide.
My experience, sad as it sounds, is that as a junior person in a corrupt research area has two choices: accept the fact that they’re going to get screwed, or find a different field.

So now, I’d like to have a word with the senior scientists.
Where the hell are you?!

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Ask an ethicist: How can I stand up to misbehavior in my field?

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In the aftermath of my two posts on allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, an email correspondent posed a really excellent question: what’s a junior person to do about the misconduct of senior people in the field when the other senior people seem more inclined to circle the wagons than to do anything about the people who are misbehaving?
That’s the short version. Here’s the longer version from my correspondent:

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Book review: Intuition.

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Intuition.jpg
Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition was published in 2006, and although I heard very good things about it, I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn’t chase down a copy to read it. Finally, last November, my department chair lent me her copy, insistent that I had to read it when I got a chance — not for any academic purpose, but to do something nice for myself. Between semesters, I finally got a chance to read it.
I have a really good department chair.

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Who has the biggest snakepit?

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As I was weighing in on aetosaurs and scientist on scientist nastiness, one of the people I was talking to raised the question of whether careerist theft and backstabbing of professional colleagues was especially bad in paleontology. (Meanwhile, a commenter expressed surprise that it wasn’t just biomedical researchers who felt driven to cheat.)
I don’t know. So I figured I’d put it to my readers:

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Peer reviewer behaving badly (and why it matters).

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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:

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Paleontologists behaving badly.

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A recent news item by Rex Dalton in Nature [1] caught my attention. From the title (“Fossil reptiles mired in controversy”) you might think that the aetosaurs were misbehaving. Rather, the issue at hand is whether senior scientists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science were taking advantage of an in-house publishing organ (the NMMNHS Bulletin) to beat other paleontologists to the punch in announcing research findings — and whether they did so with knowledge of the other researchers’ efforts and findings.
From the article:

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Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 2).

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In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, “The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children” [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. As such, it’s not unreasonable to assume that they are not coming to their understanding of this research — and to the question of whether it rises to the appropriate ethical level — from the point of view that good science should trump all other interests.

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Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 1).

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The Neurocritic alerted me, in a comment on an earlier post, to a pair of papers in the 21 December 2007 issue of Science that raise some difficult ethical questions about what sorts of research are permissible. Quoth the Neurocritic:

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 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?]

In this post, I’ll look at both Nelson et al., “Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project”. [1] In a second post in the not-too-distant future, I’ll look at the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, “The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children” [2]. (I’m breaking it up into two posts because otherwise it may require you a full pot of coffee, rather than a mug, to get through it all.) My aim in these two posts will be to lay out the recognized ethical guidelines for research with human subjects as they apply to the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), and to identify the worries we might raise about this kind of research — and, by extension, with the prevailing standards.

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Why ethics matter to science.

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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.

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