I recently finished reading Greg Critser’s Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies.
Frankly, I don’t feel so well.
Category Archives: Professional ethics
Why wouldn’t this be a good way to do peer review?
When my “Ethics in Science” class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish — subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also discussed here). In many instances, the people peer reviewing your manuscripts may well be your scientific rivals. Even if peer review is supposed to be anonymous, in a small enough sub-field people start recognizing each other’s experimental approaches and writing styles, making it harder to keep the evaluation of the content of a manuscript objective. And, peer reviewing of manuscripts is something working scientists do on top of their own scientific research, grant writing, teaching, supervision of students, and everything else — and they do it without pay or any real career reward. (This is not to say it’s only worth doing the stuff you get some tangible reward for doing, but it can end up pretty low in the queue.)
Why, one of my students asked, don’t the journals hire people to do peer reviewing? Why not make it an actual paid job?
Dissent in professional communities.
This is another piece in the discussion currently raging about the latitude members of a profession ought to have to follow conscience over the dictates of the profession.
Professions are communities of a sort. What unites them is that the members of that community are taking on a certain set of shared values.
This does not mean all members of a given profession are unanimous about all their values. A profession does not assimilate its members like the Borg. Indeed, there’s something to be said for a professional community that reflects a diversity of values and perspectives — it gives people in that profession the opportunity to try to see things through someone else’s eyes. This needn’t make you change your stance on things, but it helps remind you that your stance isn’t the only one that a reasonable person (at least, a person reasonable enough to be a member of your profession) might hold.
The big question, as has become clear in this discussion, is what ought to happen when the values of an individual within a given profession are in tension with the “shared values” of the community — where the “shared values” I have in minds are the ones explicitly specified in the professional code governing that profession. Such a code can be like a mission statement for the profession: this is what we stand for. But what about the members of the profession who don’t endorse all those values?
Personal integrity and professsional integrity.
On Abel’s post on conscience clauses, Bob Koepp left this comment:
It’s a pretty warped understanding of professionalism that would require professionals to violate their own sincere ethical beliefs. After all, someone lacking personal integrity probably isn’t going to be much concerned with professional integrity. “You can trust me because I lack the strength of my convictions.”
I think the connection between personal integrity and professional integrity is an important one, so here are some preliminary thoughts on it.
Personal conscience versus professional duties.
Abel at Terra Sigillata has a post about coscience clauses for pharmacists that’s worth a read. In it, he takes issue with the stand of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a professional pharmacy organization, recognizing “a pharmacist’s right to decline to participate in therapies that he or she finds morally, religiously, or ethically troubling” while supporting “the establishment of systems that protect the patient’s right to obtain legally prescribed and medically indicated treatments while reasonably accommodating in a nonpunitive manner the pharmacist’s right of conscience.”
I’m going to have a go at the connection between a pharmacist’s personal integrity and his or her professional integrity — in my next post. First, I’m dipping into the vault to offer the way I was thinking about this issue on the ancestor of this blog back in April 2005. Here’s what I wrote then:
Nanotech ‘blogversation’ worth checking out.
ACS LiveWire is hosting a “blogversation” (don’t shoot me, I didn’t coin it!) about nanoscience and nanotechnology. Here are the panelists:
Last push to help the Tripoli Six.
You may remember the plight of the Tripoli Six (also known as the Benghazi Six), the physician and five nurses on trial in Libya for infecting 400 children in the hospital where they were working with HIV even though there is overwhelming evidence that the most likely route of infection was poor hospital hygeine, probably before any of these six health care workers even set foot in Libya. (Nature provides details of the scientific analysis of the evidence in this PDF.)
While the public outcry from the scientific community in support of the Tripoli Six has been great, those watching the trial still anticipate a guilty verdict — which could bring a death sentence — on December 19. So once again, I’m asking you to stand up and add your voice to the call for justice here:
Karpova-Tonegawa update.
Write some letters to save the Tripoli six.
As Revere notes, the trial of the Tripoli six is scheduled to resume on October 31. This means the time for serious action is now.
As Mike Dunford points out,
If you want to do something more than just get mad, if you want to try to change things, you will need to do more than read blog articles and post comments. You need to write people. You need to call people. You need to send faxes and emails.
Honest to goodness, a letter on paper, in an envelope, addressed and stamped to get to its destination, is going to signal that this really matters to you in a way that emails will not — because you took the trouble to do something that was labor-intensive. Writing an original letter (rather than using a form letter) will further increase the chances that your plea will be taken seriously.
So I’m asking you to do something hard. But I’m also going to provide you some help in doing it.
Cultural differences of opinion about plagiarism.
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: