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A Hippocratic Oath For Scientists
grrlscientist writes "In response to what appears to be a growing problem of scientific misconduct, a group of people at the Institute of Medical Science at University of Toronto in Canada wrote a scientist's version of the Hippocratic oath. This oath (which is cited in the story) was recited by all graduate students in the biological sciences at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year." This blogger argues that merely reciting an oath is not going to help much when "...the corruption in 'science' is systemic. It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model instead of in accordance to an educational paradigm. It is due to unrestrained corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income..."
seeing as how taking oaths has worked so well for doctors, lawyers and Presidents.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When a doctor breaks their oath they can no longer practice medicine, what happens if a scientists breaks this oath. They can't study stuff?
I don't preview or spellcheck.
You will notice that the original Hipocratic oath was about serving the patient/sick, and didn't include anything about influence by outside parties. You will also notice that this oath is about influence of outside parties, and doesn't include anything about serving science.
How times have changed.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Where's the corruption in science besides when the government pays scientists to give them the desired bias in their research? Honest question, I just have no idea.
You just got troll'd!
How about the Hypocritical Oath
Working in a physical chemistry lab, I have always been comforted by the fact that I have the moral high ground over those who work in more profitable fields such as biochemistry, biology, and top-secret superweapons R & D despite the fact that grant money is much more difficult to obtain.
If this oath catches on, where will I be? I'm sure the physicists will agree with me here.
I would think that a professional oath for computer scientists / programmers / code monkeys (choose whichever term you prefer; I've considered myself an amateur at all three) would be helpful. Something along the lines of:
...or would companies avoid hiring programmers who had taken such an oath, knowing that such attention to detail might (would?) cause them to have a slower release schedule than their competition?
I pledge to not release any code which I have not tested or have reason to believe is incorrect and/or incomplete, unless such code is clearly marked as "Alpha." I further pledge not to use such unreliable and untested code in any projects for public consumption, without ensuring that the project itself is considered "Alpha" and experimental.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
the Oath for The Order of The Engineer?
it's a sad comment on the Human race when nobody can be trusted to actually walk the walk, and be true to their word.
Unions were formed to keep people from being essentially slave labor, and they depended on people actually believing in the oaths they took.Granted, dipshits pushed a lot of unions into being giant ticks suckling the lifeblood out of industries, but my prime motive for posting is true.If you can't stand by your oath, you deserve to be cut down. And I really hope the folks that understand that - are numerous in the jobs of tomorrow.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
"Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Observation: I am not involved in "ethical research."
Hypothesis: The rest of that sentence does not apply to me.
Conclusion: Never been a better time to be an evil scientist. >:-)
IMO, a much better oath would be "I pledge to face the truth and report it bluntly." The big problem in science is not the isolated cases of harming "the community" (whatever that means) or failing to do enough for your subjects. The big problem is the temptation to get funding and publications by ignoring data that don't fit what you think the editor or government grant committee wants to see. And yes, IAAS. I know of what I speak.
I think that the corporate structure itself needs to be redesigned to more closely approximate an academic culture, where scholarship is financially rewarded instead of dishonesty, and where no one earns 200 times more money than anyone else.
Sorry dude, thats called communism. It didn't work in Russia, Cuba, North Korea......and it won't work here.
I'm sorry you can't find a job, but what you call corporate greed, I call PROGRESS. I like microwaves, XM Radio, broadband internet, 57" HD TV, IPod, Prius, dual 24 inch monitors, digital picture frames, huge medical advances, increasing life expectancy, cell phones, DirecTV and laser printers. These are all things my parents didn't have because they weren't invented.
These were all things brought to you by "corporate greed". "Corporate greed" means new technology and a better life for all. Competition means better products and better ideas with quicker release to market.
Stop whining and jump on the capitolism bandwagon end enjoy the greatest, most creative, most inovative county in the world.
If you put your cause first (patients or science), then those external influences lose their power.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
FYI The oath:
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member. I love how this completely contradicts the basic principles of modern economics and government: The profit motive and market competition. This would make more sense:"I won't let profit cloud my judgement, even though profit is the foundation of my existence."
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition
>> ambition is what drives a lot of scientists. I want to do this first, not second.
>> of course many scientists want financial gain. I want to be frikkin rich just like anyone else that works their tail end off for 20 years. Why should a scientist be uniquely sacrificial of their personal well-being. At the least, their professors and universities expect to be paid back the up to 400,000 dollar tuitions.
cloud my judgment in the conduct of
>>ethical: This word is very hard to define in a stable fashion. Things that were ethical only 20 years ago are now unethical. Things that were unethical 20 years ago became ethical (in part because people just kept doing them)
research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good,
but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars
>> Scientists have forever competed. Hmm I've discovered a new truth that will absolutely destroy an entire wing of science. I better not let that out since I don't want to do something to the detriment of those guys.
of which I am now a member.
---
Pointless and even harmful to those fools who might be tricked into following it.
The only statement I might take out of it is..
I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good.
But "greater good" is still a little hard to define.
Different societies have wildly different definitions of what constitutes the greater good (along "do we consider clan/family/individual most important" and along other lines as well.
---
And not to sound like a republican, but the entire thing sound a bit communistic too- especially the part about financial gain.
So it is couched in communistic/left leaning values to begin with.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Here's the oath:
"I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member."
Translated:
"I promise to never do useful research. I will work for the benefit of those who cannot, because their need demands that I sacrifice my talents for their gain. I must never come up with an idea that rocks the boat and challenges convention."
For FSM's sake! Tell me, friend, since when has Canada the Wise abandoned reason for madness!
There is nothing wrong with greed. There is something wrong, however, with deceiving others.
Serving the greater good is wording that can only ultimately mean oneself - anything else means that other people own you (think socialism/communism). One should note that it is not in one's self-interest to deceive others.
Mostly this oath is vaguely worded and misleads people about what is truly motivational and ultimately the pursuit of science and technology. It's as bad to allow oneself to be manipulated by what this oath pretends to mean as it is to purportedly practice science with the intent to deceive/manipulate others.
I'd go so far as to say science itself is corrupt. Science is just mankind's way of pretending to know something about how the universe works, and attempting to manipulate everything natural to fit a single species' desires. The day we chose to declare our species to be masters of the universe, we invented the very idea of corrupt. If science was not corrupt, we'd probably have cured cancer ages ago. But it is not profitable to truly cure anything.
It is foolish to teach a man to fish. By doing so, you remove that man's dependency on you to sell him fish. Why teach a man how to feed himself for a lifetime, when you can have him eating out of your hand every day of his life?
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
An oath is ridiculous. You get what you pay for. I work in science. As the article says, most people are very conscious of these things. However, when you have to choose between your food or forgetting about that one data point that prevents you from publishing in nature (and being safe), I wonder...
This also suggest that papers in the top-tier journals have the biggest change of being meddled with.
they blow up the planet.
Give donations to private research not NIH. Science at the local public university is so political. The reality was sad. Nothing hardly gets accomplished. The emphasis is on getting your grant or getting it renewed, getting tenure. The work is secondary, get on the grant committee and you have it made! In reality scientist are smoozers and BSers, not Einsteins, and Rick Moranis. PHDs give A's to their grad students in the same class with undergrads that work just as hard and get C's.
Am assuming you're talking about homosexuals, not cigarettes.
Surely the best people to study homosexuality, would be homosexuals themselves? Whilst lacking objectivity, they may have much insight into the subject. And if the research project fails, it can always be converted into a Project Runway clone. Fierce!
How's it working?
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.[9]
This is rich. A bunch of pennyless, financially ignoramus scientists, daring to take on the only natural law there is, the laws of the Free Market, and thus colliding with the greatest thing in the Universe, that is Free, Private Entreprise??? Oh! The humanity!!!
I am a scientist, and I know a lot of scientists. The majority of them are hard-working people who love what they do - they are fun, interesting, intelligent and very motivating people. I find that they have more integrity that your average joe, they are ethically concerned about what they do, and they're not in it for the mighty $ (trust me on this one). Go watch yourself in the mirror before you throw another hurtful comment out about something which you know very little. Sheesh.
The summary implies a major problem, although the term 'growing' was used.
1. No evidence of substantive misuse exists. There is substantive proof of bias (particularly against women succeeding.) This is not scientific fraud. Just scientists being arseholes and using their power to diminish the lives of others.
2. More reporting of fraud is likely these days. More reporters, and lots of web search engines for them to use. But consider the activity base. Back in the days when I was a scientist, there were about 1 per 1000 of the population. At a guess then, say 2 million scientists in the world right now. (The definition of one will vary, so no exact number is possible.) Even at a absurdly low rate of 1 per 1000 being crooked, that's 2000 bent scientists. Get real. Of course there are a whole bunch of them out there. So what. Do you expect them to be inhuman. Not that would be really horrible.
3. The oath is a wishy washy load of idealistic crap. "I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member." What species do they think scientists belong to. The astonishing thing in my experience was that scientists were far more ethical than people had any right to expect. The oath allows you to be a complete bastard provided you are engaged in non-thical research and scholarship. It also expects a group driven above all by curiosity to instead be driven by the 'common good'. Well, the atomic bomb was invented for the common good. (Albeit, the common good of one side in a war, but the majority of both sides of the war agreed with having such a bias.)
4. The oath will achieve nothing. There are already punitive measures in place. Get caught even mildly fudging you data and you cease to be a scientist. For ever. You may get a job washing glassware, but you can forget any position of authority.
5. I do think the measures in place are inadequate. In the main, they rely on checking on how believable a submitted paper is (peer review), and then whether the science survives. The equivalent of an environmental impact report does not exist. The best you could hope for say, if someone discovered a simple way of isolating out uranium 235 for instance, would be for someone to exterminate the idiot. Do not expect the science community to do it for you. But scientists do have ethics committees, particularly governing the use of animals. They were really picky. (As I got older, I agreed with them.) It wasn't sufficient just to be treating your animals well. The requirement was that you interfere to the least extent possible. Considering science is agnostic, they were in the main, ethical.
Excuse the rant. Science is about as safe as guns in the community. Strong opinions are not only expected, they should be expressed. But please get my key point. It is much safer having scientists being human than following 'the common good'. The common good will be defined by either a religious power group or a political one. I'd rather have scientists caring for the people around them, and being restricted in their ability to casually affect the lives of others.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhvHB62ph8&NR=1
"After a thorough examination of every member of the group, the medical specialist stated, 'It is my opinion, that the ears, nose, throat, and accessory organs of all participating subjects examined by me were not adversely affected in the six months period by smoking the cigarettes provided.' Remember this report, and buy Chesterfields. Regular, or King Size. Premium quality Chesterfields. Much milder!"
I'm sure for plausible deniability they paid someone to produce that report. Science has been subverted by power, so that it is used to reinforce belief systems instead of producing new facts about the universe. But it's been going on since science existed at all.
Nothing new under the sun, right?
Based on my experience, such an oath is more needed in the academic community than in the corporate world. At least the commercial practice of science results in being fired if the work is not demonstrably valid while the measure in academia is the grants generated and papers published rather than the quality of the work.
What is this communist rant doing listed as news?
The authors conclusion that corporate science should be modeled on academics to prevent corruption is patently absurd. There is plenty of corruption in academics, and it is exactly the same kind of corruption. Scientists will try to misrepresent the their data in order to gain publication, notoriety, and additional funding. This is exactly the same gamble that corporate scientists take, knowing that there is a possibility that further research will support their hypotheses, they would rather move forward than give up entirely. For the record, most corporate CEOs would probably rather have accurate data too. It's much more expensive to have a failed project than a thousand lawsuits. But no one wants to wake up one day and find out they've spent the last 5 years chasing a dead end.
I agree that an oath won't help with the situation, but bizarre funding structures won't help wither, because the problem isn't the money, it's the nature of scientific investigation. Perhaps we should just be more diligent in the peer-review process.
Was it just me, or did anyone else detect more than just a bit of personal bitterness on the part of the author of TFA?
Of course, unrestrained greed motivates CEOs and stockholders, but it is more than that. Since something close to half of all life science PhDs are reduced to begging for a job at the local WalMart within four years of graduation or are forced to change careers to avoid a lifetime of welfare and food stamps, it seems that many of those who are lucky enough to remain in science do so by working at Big Pharmas. These financially struggling scientists, most of whom have reached their mid-40s having never earned more than 30K in their lives and who are grateful to simply be working in science at all, are suddenly are confronted daily with obscene amounts of wealth earned by "the big boyz" of Big Pharmas. She may have a point about scientists at pharmaceutical companies being motivated to publish only "positive" results, but her rhetoric makes it seem just as likely to me that she simply harbors a grudge against anyone with steady employment. Would simply taking an oath prevent a scientist with a huge educational debt and a young family from falsifying or ignoring data when publishing a peer-reviewed paper? Especially when it is obvious that they can easily and quickly be replaced by three or four other scientists who desperately wish to be employed, preferably in science? In short, I think that the corruption in "science" is systemic. It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model instead of in accordance to an educational paradigm. It is due to unrestrained corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income: CEOs and stockholders who typically have only a modicum of education who earn more in one year than most scientists do in a lifetime who control a group of highly-educated and -trained but financially struggling scientists. I think that the corporate structure itself needs to be redesigned to more closely approximate an academic culture, where scholarship is financially rewarded instead of dishonesty, and where no one earns 200 times more money than anyone else. Here she talks about how she wants to rework the entire corporate world to suit herself - presumably because that would make it 'more fair.' Once she stooped to the quasi-socialist corporation/capitalism bashing she really lost any sense of credibility I may have been willing to ascribe to her.Capitalism and corporations aren't evil. Some of the best science of the 20th century - no, make that of all time - has come from corporate labs. Her scathing condemnation of corporations (and other comments on her blog) leaves me with the impression that she's just another not-quite-good-enough life science Ph.D. (There are many!) who has been unable to find decent work after graduation (Don't go into this line of work for the money!) and is now angry at the whole system. She may be right about problems in how science is run in 'big pharma' but she'd have done a much better job of making her point if she hadn't degenerated into a jealousy tinged rant at the end.
But I don't think bible verses will be well received in this forum.
The problem with oaths is that the fact that you have to take one implies that you would not do the right thing otherwise. In fact, saying it almost implies that you intend to break it (kind of like the way you know not to trust someone when they say "you can trust me"). Yeah, we can pass on the whole oath thing. Lets just practice honesty and professionalism in all of our endeavors.
An oath is a great idea. However, it should not be seen as a substitute for tackling with systemic causes of misconduct. Only real investment in science at the national and international level can start to do that.
This, this is funny? I'll keep my mouth shut when you have something worthwhile to listen to. Deal?
...I swear to uphold and defend the scientific method?
What utter, utter politically correct (pc) bullshit. No really.
Anyone who tries to adhere to an oath of this type will find themselves immediately at risk of following the pc trendies to mediocrity.
Want to know how many of our most important scientists were unethical dicks at one time or another? Quite a few. Its just like in business, it's a rare mind that manages to reach the top of their field and leave no nastiness in their history.
Even my hero, Feynman, worked on the atomic bomb. You can't get away from the fact that he helped kill two cities, and yet he was such a great bloke.
Going back in history a bit, Newton was known for being a nasty piece of work at times.
I know that lots of people will be thinking about the Nazi scientists, but if you believe for one second that an oath would have stopped them, I have one piece of information for you. Most of those scientists were medical doctors who'd taken the Hippocratic oath...
Look, if your going to be a barstard, all an oath will do is make the pc crowd more easy to fool.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I'd put more effort in getting politicians and priests to have one.
I'm surprised i haven't seen a post about what should be so blindingly obvious ...
A scientist's only oath need be the scientific method. If their behaviour or research can't stand up to that, then it's immediately suspect, invalid, unethical, and unscientific. Any other extraneous oath or pledge is just meaningless words, recited to make someone (who?) feel better. If a scientist won't live up to following through the scientific method, i fail to see how a silly bunch of (wow, overly-longwinded) words will make any difference.
Perhaps I should be more diligent in my post review process as well :(
"but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member."
should read
"but never to the detriment of research subjects, the truth never being harmful to the community of scholars of which I am now a member. Never shall I skew my findings, nor shall I ignore data that does not support my hypothesis without sound reasoning to be included in my formal findings."
The oath as presented in TFA sounds nice, but the purity of the hypothesis-theory-data relationship is really what most scientists already tacitly treat as oath-worthy. Scientists who violate this relationship (e.g. falsify data, make theories up with no basis, plagiarize, systematically fail to cite important references, etc.) are pretty much already dumped into the pariah bin, lose their jobs, their credibility, etc. A formal oath stating this is a nice idea, but I don't see it as really necessary. The oath as written in TFA sounds pretty, but that second sentence also wants scientists to be altruistic and -- yikes! -- nice to each other as part of their job. I just don't see it as happening. If people are serious about addressing scientific misconduct, the process needs to be more systematic: scientists need to be educated in ethics not with an oath, but a series of ethics courses as part of any degree.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Was it just me, or did anyone else detect more than just a bit of personal bitterness on the part of the author of TFA? [. . .] She may have a point about scientists at pharmaceutical companies being motivated to publish only "positive" results, but her rhetoric makes it seem just as likely to me that she simply harbors a grudge against anyone with steady employment.
Heck, I harbor a grudge against Bush and his cronies for messing up the economy I have to live in. Are you suggesting that my being affected by his actions somehow makes my complaints illegitimate? Do you understand exactly why it is we have a criminal justice system designed to redress wrongs?
Capitalism and corporations aren't evil. Some of the best science of the 20th century - no, make that of all time - has come from corporate labs.
And this could still be the case even if those corporate labs did not happen to be bound by insane mandates. --While it is totally unnecessary, it remains actually illegal that codes of ethical behavior be allowed to hold final say on what actions an American corporate entity takes. So while I agree with you in principal, in practice the corporations which rule our lives ARE in fact demonstrably evil. Until it becomes legal for a corporation to put human lives ahead of balance sheets, evil will rule. --Even good people on executive boards have their hands tied when it comes to preventing evil practices. This stuff is quite real.
-FL
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
The problem is not with Corporations, but with the structure of society.
If a scientist works for a corporation, then he will *of course* act to the benefit of the corporation. Similarly, if his grant money comes from a corporation, then he would be stupid to kick that gift horse in the mouth.
To restore Science to the objective, trustworthy status that it deserves, there must be more science funded publicly, and by charitable donors without strings attached.
It's working great. Oath breakers don't get a second vote from me, even if they got a first one. The GOP is in ruins. Hell, even my middle class white male pro-life Catholic die-hard Republican best friend asked me the other day about the Libertarian for president thanks to Mr. Oath Breaker and his clone.
I expect that the vast majority today would agree that an abortion is bad, at least in the sense of being an unfavorable outcome if not in an absolute metaphysical sense. I expect that a majority would also think that in the abstract having an abortion is morally wrong.
Morally wrong is not an all or nothing question though. Some would think it's morally wrong on the level of killing a baby, others that it was morally wrong but of very minor importance, and some would be scattered everywhere between.
Many of those who see it as morally wrong (particularly if they see it as a relatively minor offense) nonetheless do not think that government should forbid it or punish those who obtain or perform it. I may have the opinion that billboards advertising cigarettes are morally wrong, or that certain forms of hate speech are morally wrong, or that extramarital sex is morally wrong, but that does not imply that I support a government ban on those things. Morality and legality are and should be separate concepts. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my set of morals is the one absolute true way, nor am I convinced that a government ban is always a productive and effective response even if something really is immoral.
I expect that you'd get vastly different responses to the question 'is abortion bad?' or the question 'should agents of the government imprison people who get or perform abortions?' Nuance, however, does not win votes or make for good sound bites.
"Just words."
"But good words. That's where ideas begin."
--Kirk and David, TWOK
Archimedian Oath
Newtonian Oath
Einsteinian Oath
Bill Nye the Science Guysian Oath
just some science-people names that I know...
If they aren't told that what is "slightly unethical behavior" in an undergraduate lab course is "dangerously unethical and likely criminal" behavior when practiced in the real world, how are they to know?
The punishment for "fudging" lab data as an undergraduate should be failure on the assignment. The punishment for a graduate student TA who suggests that fudging lab data on an assignment is OK should be immediate expulsion.
Support SETI@home
It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model
Corporate science is only one aspect of the problem, and I'm not even convinced it's a major one. Even in computer science, biology, or physics in areas where no corporations are involved, people are primarily out for publications and citations, and they will do anything to get them.
The reason isn't the corporations, the reason is cut-throat tenure and funding systems, and that's a problem scientists have created for themselves.
I've always wondered - how can an oath that you are more or less required to take actually be considered binding by anyone?
It's like the pledge of allegiance: if you're forced to recite it, as opposed to doing so because you truly mean it, then it doesn't have any actual meaning (trivially, since you didn't actually mean it).
How is this different? I know if I was forced to take an oath - legally, by peer pressure or in whatever other way - I simply wouldn't consider it relevant to my life at all. (No, not the hippocratic oath, either. I'd probably still adhere to it if I was an MD, but that's out of personal conviction and a personal sense of ethics.)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
[...] corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income...
In the same sentence he manages to condemn someone else for greed, and show us that in his worldview it's wrong to have more power and income than others. What next, will he attack Earth for not being flat?
Not sure if I want to hear accusations of Greed from someone driven by Envy.
As for people fudging data, in the labs I currently work in as a grad student I have come accross obviously fudged results in a dissertation I was referencing. Thing is peers and my supervisor were not suprised, students that are fudging tend to be poor researchers anyway (why else would they need to fudge?). Any good researcher knows that 'failures' provide as much information as 'successes'.
In my situation I tried three or four times (at a week per attempt) to do a reaction reported as yielding well, with variations on the supplied prep. If it had been reported as not working, I'd not have bothered - may have tried once to confirm the result, maybe twice with variations to optimize. It's not a waste of time, I confirmed that it did not work (which was suspected), however proper reporting initially would have saved me the time, I'm now on another route with some more untried preps and it is working, it might not have, but I'd be the first (we know of) so it isn't time wasted.
Why didn't we think of it! Make an oath and be gone with misconduct and greed and fraud. We can all see how well that works with doctors.
Reciting oaths on their own is simply empty ritual - McEthics, the fast-food version of ethics. A ritual may be deeply meaningful to a person who already believes profoundly in the object of the ritual, but to somebody who doesn't it merely tends to feel a bit embarrassing.
Ethics is something that has to be learned over a reasonable amount of time. You have to understand what it is and why it makes sense, and you have to have the time to decide whether you agree or not, and if you do, what that means for yourself and your subsequent actions.
I remeber a lab experiment where there was a factor of 2 error in a formula of the background documentation. The TA told me about 60% of the students came up with the 'correct' answer anayway...
...we get one for lawyers, then the world will be happier place.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
More like hypocrite oath:
"I as a scientist / engineer will endeavor to help mankind within my chosen field of science / technology.... unless there's lots of dollars waved in front of my face."
Take Nobody's Word For It.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPYvl5Alt7s
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
'Any good researcher knows that 'failures' provide as much information as 'successes'.'
Very true, but, for some reason, successes are generally more likely to get published.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
In that way the Hippocratic principles can be enforced.
Actually it is against Hippocratic principles to prescribe medicine with harmful side effects.
So, it is save to say that many doctors don't follow Hippocratic principles.
The scientific oath says:
I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
The grater good part is okey, but the second part stinks.
Because it can be interprets as:
I pursue knowledge for the grater good unless it hurts colleges etc.
But imagine that you have discovered a device that
lets you run a car without full (joe cell)
now if you colleges have stocks in a oil company then it will hurt him financially.
Or a oil company could threaten to kill one of your colleges if you publish your discovery.
Or you might prove one of you colleague wrong and there by hurt his scientific status.
It this case the last part of the oath helps to suppress new science and discoveries.
A better oath would be:
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, without harm to research subjects.
I will publish the research which can serve the grater good without fear for loss of status in the scientific community, blackmail, treats or concern for safety.
You could say that this oath take a non-deal
politic with respect to scientific terrorist.
Not in my lab. I am a teaching assistant in undergraduate (and masters student) physics labs. The emphasis is on getting good data and if this data is at variance with the 'accepted' values trying to explain why. 'Fudging' or fabricating data would lead to failing the lab and possibly disciplinary action. This is how all of our labs are taught. Which labs are you talking about? Any student who doesn't realise that fudging data is unacceptable, in teaching labs or 'real life', is stupid.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Eric Baird
IANAL but I think an oath can function as a verbal contract. If someones taken the scientific oath, and then in the course of their employment they start, oh I don't know, pushing creationism - then the employer can fire them with impunity because they essentially misled them to get the job in the first place.
I've considered putting around my physics department a 'statement of principles' - basically saying that physical phenomena can only be explained properly through the scientific method and spiritual matters have no bearing on them. Then publishing for future employees of our graduates a list of who did and did not sign it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
1. As a TA in the Animal Sciences, I've never told a student to work backwards from the answer to show their work.
2.As someone with a decade of life sciences college work under my belt I've never been told to work backwards from the answer by a TA or professor.
3. As a researcher with over 20 unique research trials under my belt I've never seen evidence of "Fudging" data by any of the 30 or so other grad-students I've worked with over the past 6 years.
During the course of my own research I've had to repeat several studies because we couldn't make heads or tails of the results, but we've never faked the data or published data we knew to be false. I have to admit that we did have to argue with a company when submitting a manuscript containing research they'd paid for. We had submitted to them a preliminary report of the results. They published the results of that report as if definitive. Over the course of writing the manuscript we found some errors in our statistical analysis of the results and corrected them. This changed the results quantitatively, but the overall conclusions remained the same. They wanted us to go with the old results because they'd already published them and made suggestions to clients based on them. However, we simply indicated that if they didn't want us to publish the new number we'd simply refuse to put our names on the manuscript. Since the reason that companies perform their research at universities is to give the picture of being independent, and without mine or my Professors names the only remaining author would be a member of the company that sells the product we were testing, they were forced to back down and the manuscript was submitted with the most accurate results we had.
I don't think they were evil, just trying to save face after making the mistake of believing that the preliminary report was 100% accurate. That's the reason for Peer Review, Independent analysis by Universities on behalf of the obviously biased funding agencies. Remember, this is the only situation I've come across of this sort in 6 years of graduate research and it was a lot less dramatic than it sounds like written here.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I'll go ahead and let you in on something that's going to get published someday anyhow. You see, every corporation employs a device that is installed in the entryway, and everyone that passes through has their proclivity for greed and corruption amplified by a factor of 100. There, I've confirmed it for you.
Haven't competitiveness and prospects for financial gain have been the basis for most major technological advances in the last century? Maybe the author wants everyone in the scientific community to go live in the Smurf village specializing in different ways they can hug trees. From the corporate side, the bosses want reliable data and well run studies during product development to ensure good performance of said product.
I've never been told by a TA to find the answer and work backwards
It doesn't have to be that blatant. In my undergrad chem labs, we were marked based on how well we ran the experiments, with the relative success based on the yield we got. So accurately reporting that we got 50% yield was enough to pass the lesson, barely. We quickly learned that doubling the reagent volumes, without reporting that we had done so, would bring our yields up to the 80-90% range we needed to get a good mark. So, without ever being explicitly told to cheat, we learned that cheating was valued over truthful reporting and acted accordingly.
In a way, this is very much in keeping with the way science is practiced. Failed experiments, well run and accurately written up, do not get published. We are rewarded for our results (true or false), not our ability as experimenters.
In my botany labs, if an experiment failed (i.e., the plant died) I reported that truthfully, and was marked based on the quality of the report, not the actual outcome of the experiment. This was reflective of the quality of teaching in our botany department as a whole, and one reason why I'm a botanist today.
yp.
Seeing how much doctors are corrupted (in my country at least), I would call the oath Hypocritical, not Hippocratic...
This is horseshit. A very big pile.
Quote from article: "I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member."
That "never to the detriment of supervisors" has me stuck. What if you discover something that will unseat your supervisor. Sometimes science surprises you.
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
ROTFL!
This oath itself is corrupt.
And it is weightless.
This kindof reminds the UN agreement on human rights, which states that no human rights need apply at all, if they conflict with the goals of the UN.
In this case, knowledge should not be pursued if it is to the detriment of colleagues (how special they are)!
This is a case of what G.K. Chesterton calls "professionalism" -- giving a pass in corruption to people of one's own profession, where it would never otherwise be acceptable in society.
If anything, science is already far too professional (in the Chesterton sense). Theories that have good foundation are ignored if they aren't presented by a Ph.D. Papers that are utter nonsense or jargon are accepted to journals as academically acceptable. Nobel prizes (superconductivity, anyone?) are awarded to those who *did not* discover the science, because they happened to be on top of the local political structure at the time.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
it's pretyt easy to get cought in the trap of subtley biasing results to get the correct answer if you know what that answer is. I mean oh wait all these results are a factor of 2 off, I must have used the wrong scale...
"We had to", was the answer, "Otherwise we wouldn't have got the money".
Eric Baird
Corporations are run by PEOPLE. PEOPLE make the decisions, both bad and good. Not all corporations are evil, just as not all people are evil. And corporations (like, for example, SourceForge, Inc.) make it possible for people to pool their energy to produce something of value and sell it for use by other people, thereby providing J-O-B-S that pay for our homes, our cars, our gasoline, our magna fetish, etc etc etc. And you'd think the last one hundred years of failure of non-capitalist systems would have convinced people that corporations and the capitalism that makes them possible is what has made our current cushy self-involved lifestyles possible. Sheesh!
What?
Actually, "bad" results do get published, and they get LOTS of citations. Look for DAMA (reported a positive dark matter signal, totally incompatible with all previous data and all theories) and LSND (reported neutrino oscillation with a big mass difference, which would need a fourth neutrino flavour to be possible. This value was incompatible with previous results, and is now barely possible).
Palladium isn't that rare...
"The global production from mines was 222 metric tons in 2006 according to USGS data.[6] Most palladium is used for catalytic converters in the automobile industry."-wikipedia
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I see a lot of posts from TAs/grad students about endemic data-fudging beginning in undergraduate courses. While I never got that impression when I was teaching, I certainly can see it coming from the top down so to speak.
The modern tenure/funding structure goes something like this: work your tail off and hope that you can meet the right people, expose yourself to the right ideas, and come up with the right proposals to get a job as an assistant professor at a good research university. You'll be hired based on your perceived ability to procure grant money before your start-up runs out which really has nothing to do with science and everything to do with what is being funding (e.g., in my arena everyone is tacking "photovoltaic" onto their proposals despite knowing very little about the topic) by the DOD, DOE, NSF, and NIH.
Now you have our job and the clock starts ticking--in 5-7 years you'd better have established a "vigorous independent research program" which is political-speak for "consistent funding" and on top of that you need to become respected within a community of scientists. This latter part is very important because you can't fudge your way into this; the community that cares about and reviews your publications will wedge open any cracks they see. Your tenure committee will basically phone these people up and say "hey do you know prof. X? Is he/she any good?".
Here's the rub; the relative value placed on these two factors--money and being well-respected in a community--depends on the institution. Some state legislatures don't like to fund universities because their constituents look at "scientists" and see nuclear weapons, drugs that kill people, etc., and take a very negative view (this is, incidentally, why the NSF puts so much emphasis on education--it is the only way to get congress to continue funding them). Thus too much emphasis is placed on money, the peer-review system breaks down, and scientific ethics start looking more like business ethics.
Now you have a young professor being pressured to publish, publish, publish (or perish) in order to get money, money, money. This professor is, depending on the institution, handed 1-5 first year graduate students and perhaps a postdoc (which is a total grab-bag) with which to make or break his/her career (in the form of tenure).
Imagine that these graduate students took the sort of classes discussed in this thread where the emphasis was (incorrectly) placed on getting the "right" answer instead of getting to an answer the right way. Their boss--the stressed out young professor--is breathing down their neck and getting snippy because they aren't in the lab on Saturday morning.
What do you think is going to happen? Obviously a lot of this comes down the management skills of the professor, the "quality" of the research (i.e., they get lucky), and the character of the graduate students. Probably 99% of the time either the fudging just doesn't matter because the work is low-profile and never gets repeated, or everyone is super-ethical and things are as they should be. The other 1% of the time you read about a relatively young professor that earned tenure through some wild success that turned out to be totally fraudulent. Of course, due to the slow pace of science, it has been years, the data are lost, and the grad students graduated, so often people throw their hands in the air and claim plausible deniability.
And sometimes people are just unethical. In any case, there is a systemic breakdown in the peer-review process that is driven largely by policy decisions that affect the funding models for public research. Too much emphasis is placed on publishing and the link between being successful in your career and being a good scientist is being eroded by narrowly-targeted funding models.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
"No job too dirty for the fucking scientists."
Given the often nearly hostile attitudes many 'scientists' have towards religion it seems like an oath is a silly kind of thing. Oath's normally being sworn for the expressed purpose of calling down the punishment of god/ god's on oneself it that which is sworn is betrayed.
I think in many ways this attempt shows why it is man continues to need God, weather or not he exists. Without a belief in God or gods why would anyone work towards the common good? It seems it would be better to work for personal gain. The common good being useful to work for only when the two personal gain and the common good were/are the same or at least not mutually exclusive.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Before we get too far down the road of Corporate Corruption in science, just note that this AXE swings in both directions. You also have an element in science that is equally "corrupt", on the opposite side.
Scientists have not been above untruth in the past for reasons not associated with cash. For instance, the anti-weapons lobby has just as many wackos working for it as the defense companies do. How many times have we heard, "You'll never intercept a ballistic missle with a missile"? Yet the US Navy has a near perfect record with missiles under the ICBM range, and the AF is about to test in that range (greater velocity and apogee makes it harder, if you need to know). Interesting to hear a scientist say "It'll never happen". Interesting attitude for a scientist ...
What about Nuclear Winter? Perhaps it is a possibility. However, how many people know that Carl Sagan could not get his initial model to work until he turned off the Sun? If you go to Wikipedia, this is not mentioned. Yet it was the rage when the information got leaked. This is the guy who wrote Cosmos, Billions and Billions and all that. He eventually got a working model (I'm not qualified to test that of course) but he was selling this as an absolute truth long before he did.
Please do not associate money and corruption as an absolute AND don't assume that money is required for corruption (or untruth).
/LabMonkey09
1. Truth comes first.
2. Everything else comes second.
3. When in doubt, return to Rule 1.
No need to talk about corporations, financial gain, competition, and all that other crap. Use these three rules and you're golden.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Everyone talks about corporate corruption, and yet, governments have way more money on average to spend on basic research. If its the money that corrupts, its governments that make the most corrupt science.
I mean, just look at Hansen.. Why does the government even pay this fool?
This is my sig.
I have a hard time understanding why everyone wants to blame corporate greed. There is no such thing!! Corporations are legal constructs controlled by HUMANS!! There are Evil and greedy humans that control corporations and Evil and greedy power hungry people that control governments. Corporations cannot legally use force only Governments can use force so Scientists are using deception instead to try and make money. Well welcome to the Human Race. The real problem is that not enough people value personal honor and are willing to accept personal responsibility for seeing to it that honesty prevails. Saying an oath will not guarantee people will abide by it. People make a very solemn oath in front of witnesses when they get married still about half of the marriages end in divorce. Nearly 50% of the population don't seem to think their word is worth much, why should scientists be any different? That's why we need to make up our own minds regarding the big issues of our day. We need to investigate the data ourselves look for replication of experimental results and observations. We must not accept the opinions of others unless they demonstrate through objective analysis and free and open disclosure of their work that they can be trusted. When their arguments fall back on opinions and cries that most people think one way or that those with opposing views are evil or ignorant that is when you need to insist on hard data and objective review of the facts and conclusions. If alternative explanations are dismissed out of hand without analysis of supporting data be careful be very careful. Accurate theories can be used to make predictions. If the theory does not predict we must reject.
Spoken like someone who's never had to get 48 students through an assignment in an hour whilst getting paid sub-minimum wage. Every TA will do this at some stage, making the stipulation that it should be done properly if it were research, but since we're really trying to teach you established things we just need to get you through.
Yes, it's not ideal, certainly it would be great if experiments really worked in class every time, and results came out as wanted, or if we had the time and patience to go through it properly, but with the deal that TAs get, there isn't enough time in the day (let alone the hour of class) to get every student to do things right.
The punishment for whoever designed these labs, understaffed them and then expects us to really teach science with the pathetically limited resources and time available, whilst paying us less than we could earn working in Starbuck's should be hanging. But don't blame the poor bastards who've been given a square peg, a round hole and a big hammer if they use the hammer. It's all we've got, and we've a thousand more pegs coming in 5 minutes' time.
3. As a researcher with over 20 unique research trials under my belt I've never seen evidence of "Fudging" data by any of the 30 or so other grad-students I've worked with over the past 6 years.
Then you aren't looking very hard. I think this type of behavior is running rampant in higher education. A report on academic dishonesty at Ohio University, (where a large number of students were found plagiarizing on their theses), found that 84% of undergrads and 55% of grad students had cheated within the last year. The report also mentions that 45% of undergrads and 18% of the grad students had engaged in serious forms of cheating, (they call it academic misconduct), in the last year.
Here is the report.
Take a look. It could be that people know you believe strongly in doing the right thing so hide their cheating from you as well.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I really like the code idea! Any starting point yet?
There are theories we know make incorrect assumptions, but too often undergraduates just take them as gospel and forget all the caveats involved. For example the ideal gas law makes false assumptions, yet undergrads running experiments would rather change the data to conform to the theory rather than understanding there are certain "fudge factors" which are needed to account for reality vs. theory.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Plagiarism and Fudging data are two different, although related topics.
I have seen evidence of plagiarism. There was a grad-student in my lab that was struggling. I was a TA in a class he was taking and the Prof told me that an assignment he emailed in contained a link to the page where half of his answer came from verbatim. He has since been booted from the university for 2 consecutive semester of academic probation.
There was also an example of a student plagiarizing most of his literature review for his PhD thesis and then having the balls to publish it. It wasn't found out until later, but my Advisor uses it as an exercise every couple of years. He hands both articles out to his students and then tells us each to prepare a 10 min presentation on the two article. Not only was it an excellent example of plagiarism, it also lets him know who actually does the reading before lab meeting. Only 2 of the 5 students realized that it was plagiarism despite greater than 70% of the paragraphs being identical to the original, copied text.
the tricky thing about plagiarism is that different countries view it very differently. I've been told by Chinese grad-students that it's almost expected by their professors back home and many of them have a hard time breaking the habit when they come the US for education.
Their is also the fine line between citation and outright plagiarism. In the first draft of my Lit Review for my MS thesis I accidentally crossed that line too far and had to rewrite a section because my advisor felt that my comments were too close to those of the cited author. I didn't copy the text, but the arguments I used and the order they were made it was just too close for him to be comfortable. When I was writing that section I didn't think I was plagiarizing. Now however, I can see the point he was making and I'm being very careful in my current lit review not to make the same mistake.
That being said, None of that is evidence of someone altering the results of an experiment to make it say what they want. Either through selective exclusion of data, or outright fabrication which is the point I believe that I was trying to make in the original post.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
to be honest even the best undergraduate labs are a bit of a joke. the entire point of the undergraduate lab isnt to teach the students proper lab techniques but to show how the knowledge they are learning is applied to real life.
bio and chem majors often have to take courses on simply running and preparing a lab, these skills are important for bio and chem majors but practically useless for an art, history, business, or math major
its not the TA's its simply there is a limited number of resources in the world, and they dont split very evenly. its in your best interest to do what ever it takes to get a head, as long as you dont get caught doing it
...That there is no mention of Lieutenant JG Wesley Crusher's influence in the making of this oath.
After all... It is he who coined that age old maxim "I'm with Starfleet; we don't lie.".
Personally, I find that it would be far more effective if they have just quoted Captain Picard instead.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The fetus isn't a person, any more then your skin cells are.
You should also look up the work "pessary ", your making yourself look foolish. Hint: It doesn't ahve anything to do with the fetus. It's something for women.
Educate yourself, you look like an idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Support SETI@home
Science is best by peer review.
Science is best when bias free.
Science can be perfect, but not approved.
Science can be appreciated, like fine art.
Science is not greed-decreed by corporations.
Science is not politic-funded by governments.
Science is never politically correct.
Science is never cleric/faith dogma.
Science always saves humans and humanity.
Humanity perverted preserves power/wealth.
IOW:
Science and scientists never were and never will be the problem.
Special decree/funded/interpretation/findings by pseudo-scientist plutocrats (corporatist, politicians, revisionist, clergy ...) is not science, but pseudo-scientist are and always have been the biggest problems for science, scientist, and humanity.
Anyway, How do we get legal/criminal separation of pseudo-scientist from Science? Should C*Os, politicians, science-degree-revisionist, clergy ... be sent to jail a/o fined for causing deaths, environmental damages, endangering the lives and welfare of people and cultures? I mean, fraudulently presenting oneself as an expert and intentionally misleading people to the extent that death/harm results is a crime, ain't it?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
it was ill informed and ignorant.:
"Obviously both abortion and euthanasia harm patients. "
Abortion doesn't harm the patient any more then any other minor procedure.
The fetus isn't the patient, and it's not a person.
You can have an opinion on that, but the are both facts, so any opinion to the contrary is crazy.
Since his information is incorrect, he has no facts, supports opinion and incorrect information as 'obvious' I can only conclude The poster is anti-science and unable to think beyond what some guy you gives tax free money to tells him.
He is exactly what is wrong with any science debate in America to day.
The paster need s to educate himself.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Myocardial infarctions? Nasty.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
My question is this.. Doctors are sworn to "Do no harm", which in medical terms has a few gray areas, but not much. However, when applied to science, what defines harm?
What if I create a new petroleum formulation that gets 20% better mileage than previous formulations? Am I doing good be reducing emissions and dependency on petro fuels? Or am I contributing to the long term dependency on oil?
And who gets to make that determination? Over 20,000 Scientists, a large number of which are PhD's are disputing Man Made Global Warming. Do they all lose their jobs because the current Ubermeunch demands lockstep on MMGW?
This is a slippery path to the loss of the only thing that ever makes real scientific progress - the right to dissent and question long held theories.
it's called peer review.
If you hide the detail of your experiment, it's no good, if no one can reproduce your results, it's no good.
If your day relies on a piece of evidence that has 'disappeared' it's called into question
It works very well, and it's how frauds are caught.
It's there because everyone knows there are biases, and the main think the scientific method does is weed out bias by showing it to many qualified people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"We quickly learned that doubling the reagent volumes, without reporting that we had done so, "
Just becasue you are an unethical bastard, doesn't mean everyone else is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The best lesson I ever had came from a basic chemistry lab class in highschool.
We were given a packet that contained the whole process for some experiment we were to run that would end up telling us how much of each component was in a mix. It had an exact, step-by-step protocol for the experiment with measures, timing, etc. all spelled out, as well as blanks for us to put our quantities in. At the end, in the analysis section, it had the "right" answers already printed there, along with blanks for our answers.
Our teams began and the teacher and her assistants left the room. A few minutes later, we all started noticing that the results we were getting were not what we "should" be getting, according to the booklet. A few teams decided to have each member (there were 3 per team) run each experiment individually and then checking our results against each other in order to see if we were screwing up in the process. Some of the other teams just decided to keep going, write down the "wrong" answers and hand in those reports. And the rest decided to just ignore the results they got and write in answers that were close to the "right" ones but were completely fabricated.
The teacher and her assistants come back and get everyone to turn in their packets, and are pleasantly surprised that some teams did the whole replication thing (which, it turned out, all of our results agreed with each other and disagreed with the packet). Then they announce: for today's exercise, anyone who submitted answers that agreed with the packet would fail. It was impossible to get the results printed in the packet by any possible iteration of the experiment that was listed, so anyone who claimed results in agreement with the packet was clearly lying. Everyone else - who wrote down the honest results - passed, and we got extra credit for doing the replication test. The lab that day was to show us the importance of honesty in research.
We then spent the remainder of the session discussing what "wrong" answers mean in science, how things that don't match expectations may, at the least, point out a simple mistake in calculations or experimental technique but might, in other cases, point to something wholly new and interesting. "I have found it!" is a nice thing to hear in science, but all the REALLY good stuff comes after, "Huh, that's odd..."
Anyway, I hate chemistry because I'm too much of a fumble-fingers with the equipment, but I'm now a researcher (psychology) and I've taken those lessons to heart. In my lab, we work on several areas that are considered controversial (effects of individual background differences on interactions etc). I spent the last academic year working on a project that wound up yielding a null-result, and so that's what we reported and eventually got published. Was it sexy? No - a validation of the status quo isn't nearly as thrilling as exposing something new. But it was honest, it was "important" in the sense that it lent validation to processes already in place, and that's cool.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I especially like the part where the doctor pledges to do no surgery. :-)
It's similar to the reason CBS still holds any broadcast licenses whatsoever, and I think deeply related to the First Amendment.
That the cure for wrong stupid and harmful speech is to let the idiot spew.
In the short term (decades), Hansen's speech is extremely harmful: Piltdown Man Part Deux. Piltdown Man is still used as a club to prevent the teaching of Biology.
But, in the long term (century+), allowing the idiot to spew will create generations of properly skeptical scientists.
I've worked for two research scientists in the private sector, and their scientific ethics were far above those of most wacademics at the local football schools.
And though one was extremely political, its effect on his work was limited to repeating one or two media templates a day. Unlike the wacademics who pollute a third of their classroom time with political spewage - in the science classes.
I've had the TAs who didn't know the subject. I've had the TAs who sanction false data.
Perhaps there are some mid-range private schools that are not shot through with corruption like the public football schools and poison ivy league.
"Just becasue you are an unethical bastard, doesn't mean everyone else is."
You're right, it was all my fault.
Still, I think it's worth pointing out that in situations that rewarded proper documentation, I was more than happy to do so. If you want people to act a certain way, you should encourage them to do so, rather than expecting them to suffer for it.
yp.
Ethics have no place in science.
The real problem with the practice of science today is that it is dependant on funding from non-scientists.
The result of this is that research is inefficent and corrupted by outside influence.
My solution to this problem is this:
If we assume that the wealth generated by scientific research is greater (perhaps much greater) than the money used to fund the research in the first place, then a good solution to corruption and inefficiency in science research is to begin funding it ourselves. Imagine if there was an enormous investment fund that was administered by scientists for science. We could invest in research of practical and academic value of our choosing and reinvest the gains in further research, taking control of our own destinies.
Imagine if this Science Association had existed when the microchip was invented for instance. How much cash would a company like Intel or IBM generate for researchers instead of shareholders. Where would the motive for fudging data come from if all you were doing was wasting what would effectively be your own money and what would the consequences be if you were found out by other scientists who held a real financial stake in what you were doing?
Is a clause that says "I will not cloud my research with Politically Correct bullsh*t" and one that says "I will not allow science to become some perverted religion e.g. Global Warming...oh wait, it's now Global Climate Change...yeah that's good...it covers everything..." So basically you should be able to question some study's methods or conclusions without fear of being subjected to a professional inquisition because it was contrary to popular opinion.
Actually, I'm a member of the Order of the Engineer which is a simple reminder to build stuff right instead of blindly extending bridges so they could be the longest span because some politician thought it would be cool.
What in the hell are you talking about? Seriously, I don't think you even understand what you're replying to. The fact that the author of the article seems to be having trouble getting a job doesn't have a damn thing to do with the problems she's talking about. Her rants against corporations and capitalism sound like they have far more to do with her disappointing career prospects than they do with critiquing corporate science. Her inability to get work has nothing to do with whatever problems may exist with science labs being run by pharmaceutical corporations. If she were angry about having been 'wronged' by virtue of having been harmed by some pharmaceutical product that had been improperly tested due to the problems with corporate science that she was talking about then what you said might begin to make sense. As it stand, your comment is incomprehensible.
Incomprehensible? No. Anybody with a bit of imagination could have easily figured that one out. You simply weren't taking the time to connect the dots. (Or weren't perhaps you weren't capable). I will do that for you now. . .
1. A system which rewards corrupt behavior with lots of money has chosen that course of behavior because it believes ethical behavior to be less profitable and requiring of more work.
2. Therefore, those who are willing to abandon ethical behavior will be rewarded in such a system while those who insist on following principals of right and wrong will be locked out of that system because ethical behavior would threaten to damage the corrupt principals and thus prevent the unethical people from continuing to benefit. (Essentially, a corrupt police force won't allow a Good officer to rise to a position of power. If that analogy is too confusing for you, just ignore it and move on. Everybody else will get it.)
3. The ethical and aware person is, because of those ethics, discriminated against and limited in professional advancement exactly because of this. Thus the ethical person is far more likely to have difficulty making a sizable income, which in the world of medicine, is actually necessary given the massive student debts accumulated during the training period. If that person is human, when they realize that they are being wronged by corrupt people, he or she will likely be upset.
Now here's the tricky part which you seem to have had difficulty with. Read slowly. . .
4. You argued that the author's being upset diminished the value of her complaint. This is not a valid argument on your part. I brought up the criminal justice system as an example because society on the whole collectively agrees that it is at least in principal, a valid system. It is a system whereby people who have been wronged make complaints which are taken seriously. Specifically, I brought up that system because the people making complaints are as a result of being wronged, nearly always upset, and that their being upset does not in any way invalidate their complaints.
5. If the criminal justice system does not consider a victim's being upset to be reasonable cause to ignore a valid complaint, then why on earth should it be any different in any other part of society? --Indeed, the criminal justice system grew out of society, not the other way around, (though you might have trouble understanding why that is relevant since it requires the ability to connect a few more logical dots.)
What is wrong with you? Do you even know anything about business or business law? I'm not even going to try and tell you how fucked up what you just said is. You need more education and less Michael Moore.
Goodness! I nearly responded to that, and your ears would have been blistered by my analysis of why what you just said is hopelessly wrong, even though it is SO much easier to simply declare with great authority that you are hopelessly wrong and that you are so far beneath me that I needn't bother pointing out exactly what it is that makes you wrong. --But then in your next para
This section about "cutting stone" actually relates specifically to the removal of kidney stones. At the time of the original Hippocratic Oath the removal of stones was performed by barbers, who although the forerunners of modern surgeons were not "doctors" in any shape or form.
Modern versions of the Oath alter various sections to make it more relevant. When the original text is used the modern interpretation is how you describe it.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
At least some corporations expect their scientists to do something productive.
I've heard and seen many examples about pure academics wasting millions of dollars going to conferences talking about doing something for years, and never achieving anything. Corruption has many forms, usually involving laziness first and greediness second. As Steve Jobs says, real artists ship.
Everyone can take this oath, but who decides how genuine the research is? Will it be a conservative or a liberal judge? Will some radical new discovery come along and face the same problems the Enlightenment scientists did at the hands of the Church? With medicine, people visibly and immediately get sick and die. Research can be bended into anything, whether conservative or liberal, pro-biology or pro-feminism, pro-evolution or pro-creation, etc.
http://www.jasnh.com/ .05). Thus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature. Without such a resource researchers could be wasting their time examining empirical questions that have already been examined. We collect these articles and provide them to the scientific community free of cost.
from the website:
Welcome to the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. In the past other journals and reviewers have exhibited a bias against articles that did not reject the null hypothesis. We seek to change that by offering an outlet for experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels (p
JASNH is published online bi-yearly.
Just a gotcha game played by junior moralists.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it