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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..."
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.
Exactly. An oath does nothing if the person giving the oath has no morals to begin with.
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.
If you put your cause first (patients or science), then those external influences lose their power.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That is part of the original or classical oath. I think that you will find that most modern versions leave that line out. See NOVA or medterms.com. The science of medicine has changed quite a bit in the couple of thousand years since Hippocrates' time. The oath has been updated in accordance with modern science.
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
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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.
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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.
I think that is more in line with changes in ethics than science.
A majority used to think abortion was bad (tho oddly not leaving the child out to die if it wasn't wanted or torturing people in front of children). Now a 50/50 or even 55/45 split exists.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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.
You'd solve more problems by making MBAs take an ethics oath. It is usually these guys that are driving people to do unethical things in government, research, corporations, etc.
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.
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.
It was spoken: It is due to unrestrained corporate greed...
There is no such thing as corporate greed. Just as there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather, there are exploiters and vices which thrive in the vacuum created by weaknesses of the human soul. The belief that human greed in the world can be defeated by replacing corporations with other structures is fallacious.
"I now inform you that you are too far from reality."
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.
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No. But just because so-and-so intelligent Greek said it, and not such-and-such other intelligent Greek said it doesn't make it objectively valid anyways. I'm not getting into the abortion debate, but the Hippocratic oath is probably the weakest argument for or against abortion.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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...
Er... Child labor, slave labor, wage caps based on non-performance metrics (race, sex, gender, etc...)... All of these are natural in pure capitalism, since there are no constraints, and it rewards people for being unethical. Being a sociopath is a BENEFIT to good capitalists, anything where this is true, doesn't sound ideal to me. Capitalism is based on exploitation, and put the individuals good above all others. This, to me, is rather towards the immoral side.
Capitalism is also prone to concentrate wealth on one end, while keeping the other end at the lowest profitable level. Which, also, is suboptimal.
Pure socialism (or as you called it "communism")is just as distasteful, of course. There is a nice mix somewhere in the middle that ensures the greatest good for the greatest number.
I think all strata of society has equal worth as beings, and that corporations should be forced to pay their equal share (since this is antithema to the model of capitalism, I say force), and they should be forced to maintain the ethical rigor of the community.
Economy is a tool that should be chained to the greater good, and not an ends in itself.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
So you're saying we should replace the hippocratic oath with a pretty picture ?
Perhaps we simply need criminal sentences for breaking any part of the hippocratic oath. There are obviously problems with that : the democrats will never agree. You cannot take the hippocratic oath and do an abortion or euthanasia, it's out of the question. So that would, by itself, criminalize (and I believe that in the original interpretation would make executing either abortion or euthanasia punishable by death by poisoning, at least that was the ancient Greek way of dealing with violations of the Hippocratic oath)
Basically the problem is that today's scientists feel totalitarian : they feel entitled to push their view on the data. Obviously both abortion and euthanasia harm patients. You could perhaps defend stopping a treatment, ie disconnecting life-giving equipment as compliant with the hippocratic oath, but euthanasia by actively terminating someone's life does not qualify as "doing no harm".
The problem is a lot more simple : it is simply not possible to agree on a moral standard with people who have no morals. Until we fix that "little issue", no oath, and certainly no pretty picture, will help.
When I was taking a behavioral research course I ran into 2 points which I considered outliers (about 4 SD outside the average), I spend a long time pondering what to do with them. I finally threw them out in terms of the main research, but was very careful to included them into the study, making it very clear what they were, my reasoning, and their quantity (32-5ms for example).
Later I found out that I'd be perfectly fine tossing them, since they were so aberrant, and totally tossed the study (the stats wouldn't be representative), and the previous research.
So sometimes tossing outliers is fine, it just require A LOT of caution, and a healthy degree of disclosure.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
You cannot take the hippocratic oath and do an abortion or euthanasia, it's out of the question.
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Sometimes killing someone is "doing no harm", and hiding behind rigid ideas *is* harmful. Sometimes and abortion *is* the right thing to do. There is always a question - which involves engaging ones morale compass, and necessitates a cultivation of insight into who you are, and what life is.
A follower of the hippocratic oath does not perform acts of euthanasia or abortion, and that's because the oath places life above any sense of wisdom or reason. For that reason alone it is wrong.
As Socrates said "I only know my own ignorance" - but the Oracle of Delphi said that he was the wisest of all. It is only an act of ignorance (and arrogance) that says that something is always in one particular way. Intelligence and wisdom must *always* be applied to *every* situation
Basically the problem is that today's scientists feel totalitarian
Basically the problem is that even as off today, too many people subscribe to black and white thinking, and fail to engage their own intelligence. There - fixed that for you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Seriously, the majority of modern medicine is a series of trade-offs of lesser evils. To give a man antibiotics is to disrupt his helpful bacteria, leaving him more prone to yeast infections. You can take the Hippocratic oath and still perform amputations if need be. Yes, this harms the patient as well, but the idea is least harm. More often than anyone is comfortable with, abortion and euthanasia come as a lesser harm.
We don't life in a black and white world. Get over it.
However, one could also argue that it's the involuntary removal of life that is the greatest harm
That would be my stance.
But we are a society. We must make a clear decision on what is worse: suffering or death.
I don't think that my society has the right to choose between my suffering or my death. I see that as one's own personal decision; or it should be, at any rate.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest