tribe of science
jstemwedel | June 11, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues:
Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.
Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments "Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo".
In other words, you wrote the equivalent of "Well, we've…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2009The 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) a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since the wrongdoing of which Kuklo was accused happened while he was at Walter Reed, the Army investigated.
That investigation "substantiated all the accusations against the physician."
The Kuklo case has lots of ethical issues we've seen before. The New York Times article…
jstemwedel | June 3, 2009Dr. Isis reports that faculty and staff at MRU will be taking unpaid "furlough" days to deal with a budget crisis:
In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question...
Cynically, I cannot help but think that the university…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics:
When I was a graduate student, I studied the effects of many different chemicals on a particular cell type. I usually had anywhere from n=4 to n=9. I would look at the data set as a whole, and throw out the outlying points. For example, if I had 4 data points with the values 4.3, 4.2, 4.4, and 5.5, I would throw out the 5.5.
Now that I am older, wiser, and more inclined to believe that I am fully capable of acquiring reproducible data, I am more reluctant to throw away the outlying data points. Unless…
jstemwedel | May 26, 2009Following up on an excellent post she wrote earlier this month, Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera brings us an update on the lawsuit against Jared Diamond and The New Yorker. You may recall that this lawsuit alleges that a story written by Diamond and published in The New Yorker defamed its subject (and Diamond's source) New Guinean driver Daniel Wemp, as well as Henep Isum, another man featured in the story but never interviewed by Diamond nor contacted by fact-checkers from The New Yorker. As described in the earlier post at Bioephemera:
Diamond's main source, a New Guinean driver named…
jstemwedel | May 26, 2009You may recall my examination earlier this month of a paper by Johnson and Stricker published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In my view, it was not a terribly well-argued or coherent example of a paper on medical ethics. Now, judging from an eLetter to the journal from Anne Gershon, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), there is reason to question the factual accuracy of that paper, too. The Johnson and Stricker paper promised an exploration of ethical issues around an antitrust investigation launched by the Connecticut Attorney General examining the IDSA's…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2009Bruce 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 particular jumped out at me:
1. LISTEN TO THE WHISPERS.
Frances Hesselbein, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management) and former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, speaks of the importance of "listening to the whispers" you hear every time you're about to make a decision.…
jstemwedel | May 19, 2009There'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 -- most of which, it turns out, were fabrications. Reich (who has published a book about Schön, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World) considers how Schön's frauds fooled his fellow physicists. Her recounting of the Schön saga suggests clues that should have triggered more careful scrutiny, if not alarm bells.
Of…
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 | May 10, 2009Dr. Isis asked me to write a letter for her most excellent Letters to Our Daughters project, which she describes as follows:
When I was a graduate student, I took a physiology class in which I was given the assignment to recreate my scientific family tree. When I did, I found that my family tree is composed some brilliant scientists. But, my family tree is also composed entirely of men, plus me. The same is true of the tree from my postdoc. I have scientific fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, but no aunts, grandmothers, or mothers. As I considered my career path in science, I…
jstemwedel | May 7, 2009At White Coat Underground, PalMD considers an article from the Journal of Medical Ethics. The article (L. Johnson, R. B. Stricker, "Attorney General forces Infectious Diseases Society of America to redo Lyme guidelines due to flawed development process," Journal of Medical Ethics 2009; 35: 283-288. doi:10.1136/jme.2008.026526) is behind a paywall, but Pal was kind enough to send me a copy.
Pal writes:
I have a strong interest in medical ethics, although I'm not an ethicist myself. Still, I'm generally familiar with the jargon and the writing styles. This piece reads like no ethics article I…
jstemwedel | May 6, 2009In the wake of some recent deaths in Edmonton of teenagers who took Ecstasy, DrugMonkey gets irritated with a doctor who made some proclamation to the press:
I'm particularly exercised over an article which quotes Charles Grob, M.D. (UCLA page):
Charles Grob believes there is a strong chance that a deadly batch of adulterated pills is making the rounds in and around Edmonton, though health officials and law-enforcement groups have issued no such public warning.
Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S. researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine…
jstemwedel | May 5, 2009By email, following on the heels of my post about the Merck-commissioned, Elsevier-published fake journal Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a reader asked whether the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS) also counts as a fake journal.
I have the distinct impression that folks around these parts do not hold JPandS in high esteem. However, it seems like there's an important distinction between a fake journal and a bad one.
Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity Weblog wrote a meticulous examination of JPandS and of the professional society, the Association of…
jstemwedel | May 4, 2009One of the interesting developments within the tribe of science is the way that blogs, email lists, and things of that ilk have made public (or at least, more public) conversations within a field that used to happen only in private.
The discussions of Aetogate on the VRTPALEO list are just one notable example, but email lists and blogs also host discussions in the wake of retractions of journal papers, investigations of allegations of scientific misconduct, and other sorts of professional shenanigans. While some of the people in these conversations cloak their identities in pseudonyms,…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2009It occurs to me that there might be an interesting parallel to the conundrum we discussed about whether it's better to engage with a scientist giving off a shady vibe or to back away with all due haste. It's not a perfect parallel, but there are some similar issues at work.
Should scientists and physicians engage with the Huffington Post?
If you follow the ScienceBlogs frontpage, you will have gathered by now that the view in these parts is that HuffPo's science-fu is not strong. Folks like PalMD and Mike the Mad Biologist and Orac have detailed some of the ways the "health and wellness"…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2009Yesterday, I shared a conundrum with you and asked you what you would do as a member of the tribe of science if you got a gut feeling that another member of the tribe with whom you had limited engagement was shady, either disengage ASAP or engage more closely.
Today, as promised, I share my thinking on the conundrum.
You'll recall from my description of the situation that:
you are presented with a vibe or a gut feeling about this other person -- you are not witnessing obvious misconduct, nor are you privy to evidence of same.
Since this is a situation unfolding within the tribe of science…
jstemwedel | April 29, 2009The other night as I was falling asleep, a situation occurred to me that struck me as something of a conundrum. (Remarkably, I still remembered the situation when I woke up.) I've been working out my own take on this situation -- what's at stake in responding to it one way or another -- but I wanted to canvass the commentariat for responses before I put my own analysis out there.
Here's the situation:
You're a member of the tribe of science. (Let's leave your position within the tribe unspecified -- you could be a student or a trainee, you could be a mid-career scientist, you could be a…
jstemwedel | April 24, 2009After considering the many different roadblocks that seems to appear when people try to discuss research with animals (as we did in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this series), it might be tempting to throw up your hands and say, "Well, I guess there's no point in doing that, then!"
Resist this temptation!
As we noted in part 7, there are good reasons that we (by which I mean scientists and the public) ought to be engaging in dialogue about issues like research with animals. Avoiding dialogue altogether would mean cutting off the flow of information about what actually happens in animal…
jstemwedel | April 23, 2009In this post, it's time to pull back from the specific kinds of dialogue blockers we've been examining (here, here, here, here, here, and here) to start to consider other ways we might get around them. Here, I want to start with some insightful remarks from a friend of mine, philosopher Vance Ricks:
When you describe "dialogue" in that post, it sounds as though you're mostly focusing on communication between A and B. One wrinkle in the animal research case (and many ethical cases generally) is that A and B aren't just (not) talking to each other; they're talking to each other AND to an…