professional ethics
jstemwedel | April 12, 2008Brian reminds us not to mistake the lull in the action in "Aetogate" (the charges of unethical conduct by Spencer Lucas and colleagues) for a resolution to the matter. We're still waiting for the ruling from the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology ethics committee. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts on the "verdict" from the inquiry conducted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. (There is a 40+ page PDF of Spencer Lucas's written responses to the allegations and of the inquiry's findings here.)
1. As I've noted…
jstemwedel | February 23, 2008There's another development in Aetogate, which you'll recall saw paleontologists William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz alleging that Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were making use of their work or fossil resources without giving them proper credit. Since I last posted on the situation, NMMNHS decided to convene an ethics panel to consider the allegations. This ought to be good news, right?
It probably depends on what one means by "consider".
On Thursday, February 21, the Albuquerque Journal reported that this ethics…
jstemwedel | February 19, 2008Yesterday I published a post with suggestions for ways junior scientists could offer some push-back to ethical shenanigans by senior scientists in their field. While admittedly all of these were "baby-steps" kind of measures, the reactions in the comments are conveying a much grimmer picture of scientific communities than one usually gets talking to senior scientists in person. For example:
[N]one of your suggestions above would work. Those are all things that we tried. But when the people in a position to do something about it are being rewarded either by their silence or by their…
jstemwedel | February 18, 2008In the aftermath of my two posts on allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, an email correspondent posed a really excellent question: what's a junior person to do about the misconduct of senior people in the field when the other senior people seem more inclined to circle the wagons than to do anything about the people who are misbehaving?
That's the short version. Here's the longer version from my correspondent:
I am and have been outraged by the blatant corruption in my field for a couple of decades, and one of the "stars" in my field was my first…
jstemwedel | February 14, 2008You've probably heard that UCLA scientist Edythe London, whose house was earlier vandalized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by animal rights activists, has once again been targeted. This time an incendiary device was left on her front door.
Abel and Mark weighed in on this appalling use of tactics to terrorize a scientist doing work on approved protocols -- protocols that had to meet the stringent standards imposed by federal regulations. But while the NIH and the odd newspaper columnist stands up to make the case for animal use in medical research and against the violent…
jstemwedel | February 7, 2008In my earlier post, I described the feeling I had as I started my graduate training in chemistry that there was a huge pile of knowledge I would need to acquire to make the transition from science student to grown-up scientist. I should make it clear (in response to JSinger's comment that I seemed to be reserving the "grown-up" designation for principal investigators) that the student versus grown-up chasm was one that I thought of primarily in terms of how much I felt I'd have to learn by the time the Ph.D. hit my hand in order not to feel like a total impostor representing myself as a…
jstemwedel | February 5, 2008I'm writing this post (and the posts following it, so the bites are of reasonable size) at the urging of Bill Hooker, with whom I've talked about these issues in real life.
The idea of becoming a grown-up in the scientific community is a thread that runs through a lot of my posts (and also guides my thinking as I teach my "Ethics in Science" class), but it turns out I hadn't written a proper post to explain the idea. This set of posts will at least serve as a first attempt.
When I started graduate school in chemistry a hundred years ago (give or take), I was acutely aware of the chasm…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2008As I was weighing in on aetosaurs and scientist on scientist nastiness, one of the people I was talking to raised the question of whether careerist theft and backstabbing of professional colleagues was especially bad in paleontology. (Meanwhile, a commenter expressed surprise that it wasn't just biomedical researchers who felt driven to cheat.)
I don't know. So I figured I'd put it to my readers:
In your experience, which scientific discipline seems most prone to fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and generally nasty business between its members?
Do you have any hypotheses as to why…
jstemwedel | February 1, 2008In response to my earlier post on the allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, a reader sent me a message posted to a public mailing list of vertebrate paleontologists. The message gives a glimpse of an attitude toward others in one's professional community that, frankly, I find appalling, so I'm going to give you my dissection of it.
Please note that the quoted passages below comprise the entire post to the mailing list, save for the poster's (presumably real) name, which I'm excising because I'm not sure I want Google to link him in perpetuity with…
jstemwedel | February 1, 2008Revere already flagged this story, but I'm going to try to move beyond the forehead slapping to some analysis of why a journal's confidentiality rules might matter. (I'll leave it to Bill, Bora, Jean-Claude, and their posse to explain how a thoroughgoing shift to "open science" might make such situations go away.)
The story, as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is that a peer reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, reviewing a manuscript that reported negative findings about the safety of a diabetes drug, broke confidentiality rules and sent a copy of that soon-to-be-…
jstemwedel | January 31, 2008A recent news item by Rex Dalton in Nature [1] caught my attention. From the title ("Fossil reptiles mired in controversy") you might think that the aetosaurs were misbehaving. Rather, the issue at hand is whether senior scientists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science were taking advantage of an in-house publishing organ (the NMMNHS Bulletin) to beat other paleontologists to the punch in announcing research findings -- and whether they did so with knowledge of the other researchers' efforts and findings.
From the article:
The disputed articles name and describe different…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008One of the things that came out of the discussion of the ethics of blogging about science at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference was a clear sense that we don't yet have general agreement about what kinds of ethics should guide science blogging -- in part, because we haven't come to an agreement about just what kind of activity science blogging is.
Is science blogging more like journalism or the scholarly activities of scientists reporting their findings to their peers? Is it education or punditry? Is it a profession or a hobby?
Different bloggers (and different blog readers) seem to…
jstemwedel | December 12, 2007In light of the ongoing flap about Iowa State University's decision to deny tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, I thought it might be worth looking at an actual university policy on tenure -- the policy in place at my university -- and considering the sorts of judgments required by policies like this. The take-home message is that tenure can't be taken as a "sure thing" if only you produce a certain number of publications.
First, it's worth pointing out that each college and university has its own policy on tenure, and my sense is that the policy at my university is rather more explicit than most…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007In response to my open letter to the ACS, Rudy Baum, the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, emailed me some information which I am posting here with his kind permission:
The editorial independence of editors of ACS publications, including C&EN, is guaranteed by the ACS Constitution, Bylaws & Regulations. There are no topics of interest to the general community of chemists that are off limits at C&EN. No one in ACS governance or on the ACS staff has ever suggested that we should or should not cover a topic for any reason.
ACS has a clear and consistent policy on…
jstemwedel | October 25, 2007Like Revere and the folks at The Scientist, I received the series of emails from "ACS insider" questioning the way the American Chemical Society is running its many publications -- and in particular, how compensation of ACS executives (and close ties to the chemical industry) might influence editorial policies at ACS publications.
The ACS disputes the details of the anonymous emails, so I won't have much to say about those. But as an ACS member (who is, at present, participating in an ACS regional meeting), I'd like to ask the Society for some clarity.
Does each member matter to the ACS?…
jstemwedel | September 12, 2007Perhaps you've already seen the new(ish) AAUP report Freedom in the Classroom, or Michael Bérubé's commentary on it at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. The report is such a clear statement of what a professor's freedom in the classroom amounts to and, more importantly, why that freedom is essential if we are to accomplish the task of educating college students, that everyone who cares at all about higher education ought to read it.
Some of the highlights, with my commentary:
On concerns that professors "indoctrinate" rather than educate:
It is not indoctrination for professors to expect…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007
People sometimes worry that throwing ethics coursework at scientists-in-training is not such a great strategy for training them to be ethical scientists. (I've explored worries of this sort myself.)
For one thing, at many schools the existing coursework may be a fairly broad "moral issues" course aimed at understanding what it means to be a good person rather than a good scientist.* Or the ethics course on the books may have more to do with meta-ethics (the examination of various theoretical frameworks grounding claims about what is good and what is bad) rather than practical ethics. And…
jstemwedel | July 5, 2007 I recently finished reading Greg Critser's Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies.
Frankly, I don't feel so well.
Critser starts off by dropping us into the regulatory environment in the U.S. in the early 1970s, walking us through the multifarious forces that started to change that environment. Some of the changes seem welcome and important -- for example, removing the requirement that companies wishing to market generic versions of FDA approved drugs (once the patents had expired on those drugs) produce additional studies demonstrating the…
jstemwedel | May 14, 2007When my "Ethics in Science" class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish -- subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also…
jstemwedel | March 1, 2007This is another piece in the discussion currently raging about the latitude members of a profession ought to have to follow conscience over the dictates of the profession.
Professions are communities of a sort. What unites them is that the members of that community are taking on a certain set of shared values.
This does not mean all members of a given profession are unanimous about all their values. A profession does not assimilate its members like the Borg. Indeed, there's something to be said for a professional community that reflects a diversity of values and perspectives -- it gives…