Category Archives: Globalizing science

Cultural differences of opinion about plagiarism.

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In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*:

I’ve heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which “plagiarism” as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I’m suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, “But, in country X, where I’m from, this is how everyone does it. Sorry, I didn’t know the norms were different here.” Unfortunately for this student, the Dean was also from country X and was able to say, with authority, “‘Fraid not.”)

Since then, I’ve found some slightly-less-vague claims from the pages of Chemical & Engineering News. However, these are still almost second-hand, “word on the street” kind of claims that some cultures involved in the practice of science think plagiarism is just fine. Have a look at the relevant passage:

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A matter of life and death: scientific judgment without borders.

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In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn’t raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:

The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. …
During the first trial [in 2004], the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome’s Tor Vergata University, to examine the scientific evidence. The researchers carried out a genetic analysis of viruses from the infected children, and concluded that many of them were infected long before the medics set foot in Libya in March 1998. Many of the children were also infected with hepatitis B and C, suggesting that the infections were spread by poor hospital hygiene. The infections were caused by subtypes of A/G HIV-1 — a recombinant strain common in central and west Africa, known to be highly infectious.
But the court threw out the report, arguing that an investigation by Libyan doctors had reached the opposite conclusion. Montagnier believes the judgement was based at least partly on mistranslation from English to Arabic of the term ‘recombinant’ — instead of referring to natural recombination of wild viruses, as intended, it was interpreted to mean genetically modified, implying human manipulation.

(Bold emphasis added.)
The evidence suggests that the children were infected due to negligence in the hospital — but not by the six health care providers on trial for their lives. Conveniently, they are foreigners — a Palestinian physician and five Bulgarian nurses, so the Libyan court and hospital can exact “justice” without accepting anything like responsibility for the errors that infected the children.
But to cast scientific evidence aside so you can put your convenient scapegoats before the firing squad is absolutely intolerable.

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Outsourcing research

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Every now and then, I take a moment to read my unsolicited commercial email before binning it. (Note to eMarketers: This moment is generally used to mock and deride the goods and/or services offered in the unsolicited commercial email. Take me off your stupid mailing lists!) The other day, I came upon a message offering me a service that’s a new one to me: outsourcing research.
As a professional philosopher, I don’t have much call to outsource my research (which mostly consists of reading, thinking hard, pounding away at the keyboard, and swearing if MS Word crashes in the middle of a crucial sentence). But if I were trying to run a chemistry lab, the idea of outsourcing research might be very appealing.
And, it may surprise you to learn, I think there might even be positive effects for our body of scientific knowledge from trying something like this.

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