misconduct
jstemwedel | May 19, 2009Yesterday, I posted the first part of my interview with Sean Cutler, a biology professor on a mission to get the tribe of science to understand that good scientific competition is not antithetical to cooperation. Cutler argues that the problem scientists (and journal editors, and granting agencies) need to tackle is scientists who try to get an edge in the competition by unethical means. As Cutler put it (in a post at TierneyLab):
Scientists who violate these standards [e.g., not making use of information gained when reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication] are unethical - this is…
jstemwedel | May 18, 2009Sean Cutler is an assistant professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside and the corresponding author of a paper in Science published online at the end of April. Beyond its scientific content, this paper is interesting because of the long list of authors, and the way it is they ended up as coauthors on this work. As described by John Tierney,
Dr. Cutler ... knew that the rush to be first in this area had previously led to some dubious publications (including papers that were subsequently retracted). So he took the unusual approach of identifying his rivals (by…
jstemwedel | March 12, 2009The headlines bring news of another scientist (this time a physician-scientist) caught committing fraud, rather than science. This story is of interest in part because of the scale of the deception -- not a paper or two, but perhaps dozens -- and in part because the scientist's area of research, the treatment of pain, strikes a nerve with many non-scientists whose medical treatment may have been (mis-)informed by the fraudulent results.
From Anesthesiology News:
Scott S. Reuben, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., a pioneer in the area of multimodal analgesia, is said to…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2009You may recall the case of Luk Van Parijs, the promising young associate professor of biology at MIT who was fired in October of 2005 for fabrication and falsification of data. (I wrote about the case here and here.)
Making stuff up in one's communications with other scientists, whether in manuscripts submitted for publication, grant applications, scientific presentation, or even personal communications, is a very bad thing. It undermines the knowledge-building project in which the community of science is engaged. As an institution serious about its role in this knowledge-building…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2008Sadly, the Houston Chronicle brings us another story about an academic caught plagiarizing. The academic in question is Rambis M. Chu, a tenured associate professor of physics at Texas Southern University, who is currently under investigation for plagiarism in a grant proposal he submitted to the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Since the investigation is still under way, I'm open to the possibility that Chu will present some evidence to demonstrate his innocence here. However, should the facts reported in the Houston Chronicle stand up to scrutiny, this is shaping up to be one of those cases…
jstemwedel | September 9, 2008While other ScienceBlogs bloggers (notably Revere and Orac) post periodically on the state of the scientific evidence with regard to whether cell phones have biological effects on those using them, I've mostly followed the discussion from the sidelines. Possibly this is because I'm a tremendous Luddite who got a cell phone under protest (and who uses a phone with maybe three functions -- place a call, receive a call, and store phone numbers). Possibly it's because in my estimation the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2008The other day, Chad asked about the appropriate use of someone else's published data:
There's a classic paper on the Quantum Zeno Effect that I discuss in Chapter 5 of the book. The paper does two tests of the effect, and presents the results in two bar graphs. They also provide the data in tabular form. ...
If I copy the data from the table, and make my own version of the graph, am I obliged to contact them and ask permission to duplicate their results in my book?
Chad's commenters were of the view (substantiated with credible linked sources) that data itself cannot be copyrighted under U.…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007 I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I'm hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response -- there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions -- but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:
The events and personalities…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2007In my last post, I examined the efforts of Elizabeth Goodwin's genetics graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal responsibly with their worries that their advisor was falsifying data. I also reported that, even though they did everything you'd want responsible whistleblowers to do, it exacted a serious price from them. As the Science article on the case [1] noted,
Although the university handled the case by the book, the graduate students caught in the middle have found that for all the talk about honesty's place in science, little good has come to them. Three of…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2007One of the big ideas behind this blog is that honest conduct and communication are essential to the project of building scientific knowledge. An upshot of this is that people seriously engaged in the project of building scientific knowledge ought to view those who engage in falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and other departures from honest conduct and communication as enemies of the endeavor. In other words, to the extent that scientists are really committed to doing good science, they also have a duty to call out the bad behavior of other scientists.
Sometimes you can exert the…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2007My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2007An important part of the practice of science is not just the creation of knowledge but also the transmission of that knowledge. Knowledge that's stuck in your head or lab notebooks doesn't do anyone else any good. So, scientists are supposed to spread the knowledge through means such as peer reviewed scientific journals. And, scientists are supposed to do their level best to make sure the findings they report are honest and accurate.
Sometimes, scientists screw up. Ideally, scientists who have screwed up in a scientific communication need to set the record straight. Just what is involved…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2007Abi at nanopolitan nudged me to have a look at Nature's recent article on what has become of targets of recent scientific fraud investigations. He notes that, interspersed with a whole bunch of poster boys for how not to do science, there are at least a couple folks who were cleared of wrongdoing (or whose investigations are still ongoing) which seems, to put it mildly, not the nicest way for Nature to package their stories.
So, I'm going to repackage them slightly and add my own comments. (All direct quotations are from the Nature article.)
Scientist: Jon Subdo, researcher at Oslo's…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2006Yesterday, I recalled MIT's dismissal of one of its biology professors for fabrication and falsification, both "high crimes" in the world of science. Getting caught doing these is Very Bad for a scientist -- which makes the story of Luk Van Parijs all the more puzzling.
As the story unfolded a year ago, the details of the investigation suggested that at least some of Van Parijs lies may have been about details that didn't matter so much -- which means he was taking a very big risk for very little return. Here's what I wrote then:
The conduct of fired MIT biology professor Luk Van Parijs, as…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2006Just over a year ago, MIT fired an associate professor of biology for fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct always incurs my ire, one of the things that struck me when the sad story of Luk Van Parijs broke was how well all the other parties in the affair -- from the MIT administrators right down to the other members of the Van Parijs lab -- acquitted themselves in a difficult situation.
Here's what I wrote when the story broke last year:
Can you believe there's another story in the news about a scientist caught fabricating and falsifying data? Also, the sky is blue.…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2006Things have been busy here, but there are some interesting stories I've been watching that I thought I should mention (as well as the usual fodder for rants, and a cartoon series that might be funny, if it's not just seriously twisted):
A few atoms of element 118 have been created and detected by Russian scientists and scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Labs -- without any fabrication this time, which is good. However, the unofficial name of the new element (ununoctium, which is Latin for "one-one-eight"), needs some work. Yeah, the atoms of 118 lasted less than a microsecond, but…
jstemwedel | August 12, 2006From time to time I get emails asking for advice dealing with situations that just don't feel right. Recently, I've been asked about the following sort of situation:
You're an undergraduate who has landed an internship in a lab that does research in the field you're hoping to pursue in graduate school. As so often happens in these situations, you're assigned to assist an advanced graduate student who is gearing up to write a dissertation. First assignment: hit the library and write a literature review of the relevant background literature for the research project. You find articles. You…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2006A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He's no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the "preliminary studies" sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments.
Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will be doing some time for his crimes. From the Burlington Free Press:
Former University of Vermont professor Eric Poehlman on Wednesday became the first academic researcher in the country to be sentenced to prison time for fabricating data in scientific…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2006
I should have known it would come to this.
A week into our ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for schools, the warm spirit of pan-science-harmony has started to erode.
An anonymous source has come into possession of the text of an attack ad targeting our biological brethren and sistern. I hate to even give a story like this oxygen, but in the interests of full disclosure, I reproduce the ad below the fold.
"If it's green and wriggles, it's biology."
"Biology is just stamp-collecting."
"Biology is the 'science' with the greatest preponderance of women."
"If biology were a real…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2006Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves -- with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments.
Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical.
Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in…