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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.
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."
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?
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!
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.
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.