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..."
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.
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!
We have one for engineering. http://order-of-the-engineer.org/oblig.htm
"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 once considered a "hobo code" for programmers--obscure symbols that you could mark code or an office with that would mean things like
- this project is doomed,
- this project is likely to incur a loss of $100 million as it fails,
- this project will get people killed,
- I would be fired if I told the truth about this project,
- I would be killed if I told the truth about this project,
- etc.,
as a warning to other prospective programmers. And yes--I have worked on some really awful projects.]"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
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.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
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?
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.
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
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.
Pure capitalism is not inherently immoral; it does not "coerce", per se; it simply allows individuals to make decisions.
The worst parts of pure capitalism are simply that it may cause large monopolies, which doesn't so much hurt people as it may simply slow down a field by inflating prices or causing products and services to be less than what they would have been in a competitive arena. Such monopolies can be toppled though as others may seek higher quality products/services at a premium from a smaller business.
Communism, on the other hand, forces the hand of individuals in the name of society or "the people", which is "everyone who isn't you"--being a slave to the masses is not my idea of freedom, although to some people, it is.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
In my opinion, all collected data should be reported one way or another. If you have a reason to believe that errors exist in your data, that calls the entire study into question, and your results should reflect that. If you intend to do a correlation and you want to exclude data points, you should have a specific reason reason to believe that the data points are invalid. Not being characteristic is not really a good reason. You should at least have a hypothesis about the cause of outliers, so that future experimentation can be designed to avoid them.
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
Myocardial infarctions? Nasty.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
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
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.
And the usual $64,000 question:
While the skin cells have around 0% chance of growing into a functioning human, the fetus stands a better one. Precisely at which point does it become a "person"? Birth? Age 2? 4?
Jus' sayin'....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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?