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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..."
there are legal consequences as it is, a scientist's lab notebook is considered a legal document, fudging/lying in this case is already something that has legal consequences. I would imagine that any break of such an oath as the one mentioned in the article would at the least result in it being exceedingly difficult to publish in any journal the least bit reputable and possibly legal action.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
We have one for engineering. http://order-of-the-engineer.org/oblig.htm
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.
I wonder how many people went down the same path, realized they did NOT have cold fusion, and (ethically) didn't fudge results to make it look like they did? As with anything else, it's the bad seeds that drag everything down for the majority. And as with anything else, the protections (e.g. a silly oath) will only matter to the people who are already telling the truth.
So in short, I agree. :p
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."
there are legal consequences as it is, a scientist's lab notebook is considered a legal document,
Not really. Just about the only time it becomes relevant is to establish patent ownership.
fudging/lying in this case is already something that has legal consequences.
I doubt it. Lying isn't illegal (in most cases). Lying on your government grant results is illegal in many jurisdictions. It's hard to prove the difference between fraud & error.
I would imagine that any break of such an oath as the one mentioned in the article would at the least result in it being exceedingly difficult to publish in any journal the least bit reputable and possibly legal action.
You don't know much about journals & academics. Scientists get blackballed all the time, for the most petty reasons. Two professors in my department had a huge feud over a parking space, which they then took out on each others grad students.
Did you read the terms of this oath? It contains vague terms like "greater good", which can mean absolutely anything.
This oath is a meaningless petty gesture.
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!
Personally, I was more caught by the blogger's throwaway remarks about "corporate science". The truth in my experience is that academics exaggerate to get grants and manipulate data to publish papers. For instance, a substantial fraction of chemistry research cannot be reproduced because the results shown are a fluke, and the applications of an idea are often grossly exaggerated. For instance, some scientists invented a new alloy which they suggest will revolutionize crumple-zones in cars. This alloy includes palladium, a rare-metal. Indeed so rare, if all the palladium on earth were to be used to make this new alloy, we'd get about a cubic meter of the stuff.
You just don't get away with this sort of stuff in industry. For instance the famous Bell Labs scientist who falsified his nanotech research. This was then discovered by a competing group at IBM. In industry, scientific fraud is hard b.c. the standards for research go beyond publishing a few page journal article.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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."
I find these sorts of accusations amusing since I am a research scientist myself and work for industry. My experience is simply that people are people everywhere. You get good and bad in science -- for example, scientists who would do and say anything for a little face time in front the the press, and scientists who will lay their career on the line to fight business decisions with bad medical consequences.
But the notion that corruption is the norm in industry is a sign of maybe a bit of ignorance and paranoia?
At the end of my Psychology degree, during our last module, they told us about studies which were generally critical of Psychology, which included the scientific integrity issue. I forget whose study it was (Williams?), but someone had gone to the trouble of contacting a large number of authors of academic papers and had asked for their original data to review it. About half had 'lost' it, and of the rest about 1/3 had made at least one significant error.
I wondered at the time what could be done about this and whether it would help to write a small open source data-faking program, which would generate random results in line with the what the researcher wanted to find. By making it blatantly easy to massage/fake results (which was rife with the students writing their dissertations and faintly rumoured regarding certain staff), the problem would be hard to ignore as everyone would be under suspicion.
Obviously this won't make it possible to spot essentially undetectable faked results, but it might place more pressure on scientists to make their results truly verifiable and start a (possibly panicked) discussion about how to maintain credibility, which seeems to currently be based largely on the assumption of good character.
Or then again I may just be bitter about doing my research properly and not having taken the easy route like everyone else on the course.
Aargh! Damn Psychology!
[grasps head]
Can't...
stop...
analysing....
Gnnnh!
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'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.
It does not in the hippocratic oath, perhaps you should read it.
(Human) life is valued above all else, and specifically it is valued OVER comfort.
Therefore it is a VERY stretched interpretation that you'll need to allow passive euthanasia. Abortion : terminating one human life for the comfort of another is a definite, loud NO for the hippocratic oath.
As is active (and let's be honest, passive too) euthanasia.
Here's the text (which you haven't read) :
...
I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.
To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death.
Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.
But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts.
I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.
In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.
All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.
Note that this leaves one thing open that you're going to disagree with : it indeed allows doctors to carry out the death penalty (even in cases where they do not necessarily agree with the verdict).
Still in favor of the hippocratic oath ? I know I am though.
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 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.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Not really. Good science is about producing verifiable claims. Good science is will documented, self consistent, and verifiable. If every scientist was rocking the boat it would mean no science was every verified, so it would be worthless. Science is a long slow endeavor, not a "ureaka!"
Global climate change was "rock the boat science" for a long time. It's only in the last decade that it's been gradually excepted by most scientists. It's been an amazing thing to witness. There are plenty of very conservative hippy-hatting scientist who'd quit science before they'd lie who believe (and publicly admit) that CO2 is causing a shift in the climate that could have drastic consequences. There's no alternative hypothesis that fits the data. The ones you hear from the media have been studied to death, but everyone is too lazy to read science papers.
The big question now is, "What do we do?" That's an impossible question for science, because it involves global markets and predicting future technology. Ignoring the question by pretending there's a vast conspiracy is silly.
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.
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?