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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..."
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.
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."
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 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.
What the prevailing opinion on abortion was depended on time and place. It's not so simple that you can just say "a majority used to think abortion was bad" even in just America. In some places, it was just fine with most people as long as it occurred before the "quickening," the fetus's first movement in the womb. Before that time, the fetus was considered to be part of the woman's body. This attitude was reflected in English common law until the 19th century, when abortion was criminalized--for the health of the mother, rather than the fetus. Abortion remedies were notoriously dangerous.
The idea that abortion is morally wrong because it destroys the life of the fetus is a reason invented to keep the law in place retrospectively. It was not the intent of those who put the laws into place.
When Hippocrates invented his eponymous oath, most Greeks were okay with abortion. Its banning of abortion was so odd, in fact, that it prompted some scholars on that basis alone to associate the oath with Pythagoreanism, the one strand of ancient Greek thought known to ban it entirely.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.