As a brief follow-up to my post thinking about Dr. J’s view that cats are a special class of being that ought not be used in research, I would like to assert that:
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
Non-rational lines, empathy, and animal research.
Today, at R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S., Dr J. posted a picture of a charming looking cat with the following text:
As little as I can do to push back against the sick minded evil mo-fo bastards who think animal testing on cats is ok….from now on I will post occasional photos of cats as a reminder that these animals are infinitely better than the low life scum that would put them in a lab and murder them, or would sit on an animal experiments committee and authorize their use in any such way, or cite papers involving their research or in anyway devalue them…I think you are debasing and damaging science by doing so and your moral fabric is in shreds and it is time to get it sorted, there is no acceptable justification.
Along with some of the follow-up in comments on that post, Dr. Isis finds this alarming:
Science Scout badge tally.
You may recall a couple years ago when the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique started issuing badges.
Now, the Science Scouts have a spiffy new webpage and many new badges … and there are rumors (or should I say rumours) that actual, physical badges, suited for stitching onto sashes or lab coats, will be available.
So it seems like a good time to review the badges I have earned thus far as a Science Scout.
Announcing your findings (but not really).
Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues:
Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.
Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments “Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo”.
In other words, you wrote the equivalent of “Well, we’ve submitted this to Nature, but they won’t accept it or publish it if the news gets into the press, so can all of you reading this just not actually, you know, tell anyone? Oh, but can you make sure that you give us credit for the discovery, instead of the competing team? Thx!”
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove to talk about), I’m writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors’ potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged scientists, who are then supposed to keep their mouths shut so that the authors can get a paper into a particular journal — one that is not noticeably more influential in astrophysics (i.e. the difference between Nature and non-Nature is not nearly as big a deal as it is in biology).
The authors in this case are kind of announcing their findings to other scientists in their field — but, owing to the embargo on their results, they kind of aren’t.
What’s going on here?
Familiar themes in a new instance of scientific misconduct: the Kuklo case.
The New York Times has an article about a physician-scientist caught in scientific misconduct. The particular physician-scientist, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, was an Army surgeon working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is now (for the time being anyway) a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since the wrongdoing of which Kuklo was accused happened while he was at Walter Reed, the Army investigated.
That investigation “substantiated all the accusations against the physician.”
The Kuklo case has lots of ethical issues we’ve seen before. The New York Times article goes through them for the Nth time. That we’ve seen these same issues in misconduct and “misbehavior” cases on many, many, occasions might make one wonder how scientists, journal editors, and corporate sponsors of research failed to internalize any of the lessons they might have learned from the (N-1) times that came before this one.
After all, they’re supposed to be good at spotting trends in the data.
Among the familiar themes in this case, I notice:
When academics are furloughed, they should act like they’re on a furlough.
In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question…
Candid Engineer on data handling and ethics.
In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics:
Are you a scientist or a journalist here? Either way, you’re bound by ethics.
Following up on an excellent post she wrote earlier this month, Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera brings us an update on the lawsuit against Jared Diamond and The New Yorker. You may recall that this lawsuit alleges that a story written by Diamond and published in The New Yorker defamed its subject (and Diamond’s source) New Guinean driver Daniel Wemp, as well as Henep Isum, another man featured in the story but never interviewed by Diamond nor contacted by fact-checkers from The New Yorker. As described in the earlier post at Bioephemera:
‘Chronic’ Lyme disease article in Journal of Medical Ethics called unethical.
You may recall my examination earlier this month of a paper by Johnson and Stricker published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In my view, it was not a terribly well-argued or coherent example of a paper on medical ethics. Now, judging from an eLetter to the journal from Anne Gershon, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), there is reason to question the factual accuracy of that paper, too. The Johnson and Stricker paper promised an exploration of ethical issues around an antitrust investigation launched by the Connecticut Attorney General examining the IDSA’s process for developing guidelines for Lyme disease. In particular, Johnson and Stricker suggested that conflicts of interest led the IDSA panel to improperly exclude “chronic” Lyme disease from their disease definition and treatment guidelines.
It’s true that IDSA has a horse in this race. However, as I noted in my earlier post, so do Johnson and Stricker. And unlike Johnson and Stricker, IDSA president Gershon seems to have a good handle on how to frame coherent and persuasive arguments.
From Gershon’s eLetter:
Advice on how to be ethical.
Bruce Weinstein (“The Ethics Guy” at BusinessWeek.com) offers advice on how to be ethical to the business school class of 2009.
His five nuggets of advice seem like good ones for anyone who is interested in being ethical. Two in particular jumped out at me: