Adventures in Ethics and Science

Familiar themes in a new instance of scientific misconduct: the Kuklo case.

Category: Current events

The New York Times has an article about a physician-scientist caught in scientific misconduct. The particular physician-scientist, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, was an Army surgeon working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is now (for the time being anyway)...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 6:59 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Advice on how to be ethical.

Category: Ethics 101

Bruce Weinstein ("The Ethics Guy" at BusinessWeek.com) offers advice on how to be ethical to the business school class of 2009. His five nuggets of advice seem like good ones for anyone who is interested in being ethical. Two in...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 5:35 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The mechanics of getting fooled: the multiple failures in the fraud of Jan Hendrik Schön.

Category: Misconduct

There's an interesting article in the Telegraph by Eugenie Samuel Reich looking back at the curious case of Jan Hendrik Schön. In the late '90s and early '00s, the Bell Labs physicist was producing a string of impressive discoveries --...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:17 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Mentoring ethics and authorship ethics.

Category: Communication

Should "what's mine is yours" be the guiding principle in assigning authorship?

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 3:53 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

A serious contender for dumbest excuse of 2008.

He defended the views he expressed in many of his radio programs and said that, because he consulted for so many drugmakers at once, he had no particular bias. "These companies compete with each other and cancel each other...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 7:07 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Conditions for ethical therapeutic use of a placebo.

Jake has a great post up today about the frequency with which American internists and rheumatologists prescribe placebos and the ethical questions this raises. Jake writes: For my part, I don't think I would be comfortable deceiving my patient under...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:34 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The kind of thing that makes industry 'science' look bad.

In a post last week, I mentioned a set of standards put forward by Carol Henry (a consultant and former vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council), who says they would improve the credibility of industry-funded...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 4:35 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Standards for industry-funded research.

In the August 25, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there's an interview with Carol Henry (behind a paywall). Henry is a consultant who used to be vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC)....

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 12:18 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Aetogate aftermath: paleontologists discuss the norms of their discipline.

How do paleontologists get on the same page about the norms guiding their scientific practice?

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 8:00 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Considering an ethicist's 'questionable behavior'.

The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee's departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article "An Unethical...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:22 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks