Ethical research
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…
Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 2).
jstemwedel | January 11, 2008In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children" [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the…
Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 1).
jstemwedel | January 9, 2008The Neurocritic alerted me, in a comment on an earlier post, to a pair of papers in the 21 December 2007 issue of Science that raise some difficult ethical questions about what sorts of research are permissible. Quoth the Neurocritic:
This may be a little off-topic, but I was wondering if you read this article in Science, beginning of abstract pasted below.
In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned to…
jstemwedel | January 8, 2008Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you're doing science. There's a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it's rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren't completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers…
jstemwedel | July 2, 2007In the discussion on the earlier post about what policies should govern lab notebooks kept by graduate researchers, the commentariat identified a number of important considerations. At least a few of the commenters were sure that a one-size-fits-all policy wouldn't work, and collectively the comments identified some central questions that go to the heart of how, precisely, lab notebooks are supposed to function:
The permanent record of what was done and what was observed.
To the extent that research is a matter of setting up particular conditions and recording careful observations of what…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.
As I mentioned in my comments to the earlier post, in many cases there is an…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group.
I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help.
First, before critiquing the…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…
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 | June 4, 2007Via a press release from Consumers Union, the July 2007 issue of Consumer Reports will include a call for more testing and regulation of nanotechnology:
[T]he risks of nanotechnology have been largely unexplored, and government and industry monitoring has been minimal. Moreover, consumers have been left in the dark, since manufacturers are not required to disclose the presence of nanomaterials in their labeling.
Your first question may be, what the heck is nanotechnology? From the press release,
Nanotechnology involves creating new materials or reducing the particles in standard materials…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2007I've been flailing lately (most recently in this post) with the question of how to reconcile how science ought to be done with what actually happens. Amidst my flailing, regular commenter DrugMonkey has been doing what some might characterize as getting up in my grill. I'm inclined to view DrugMonkey's comments as pushing me to be clearer and more focused in setting out and attacking the problem.
For instance, in this post on the pros and cons of an ethics class aimed at science majors but taught by a philosopher (me), DrugMonkey comments:
The messenger is irrelevant. This is not the…
jstemwedel | May 19, 2007In the comments on a number of recent posts, I've been sensing a certain level of cynicism about the realities of scientific practice, and it's been bumming me out. (In fairness, as I reread those comment threads today, the comments aren't as jaded as I remember them being; it's probably that the ones with a cynical edge are staying with me a bit longer.)
I am not bummed because I think people ought to have a picture of the scientific community as one where everyone is happy and smiling, holding hands and singing and wanting to buy the world a Coke. What's sticking in my craw a little is…
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 | February 22, 2007Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I've dealt with before (and it's at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.
First, for the sake of argument, I want to set aside all questions of Marcus…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2007By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as "impeccable") about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.
There have been interesting discussions in the comments on the linked posts about what…
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 | January 24, 2007ACS LiveWire is hosting a "blogversation" (don't shoot me, I didn't coin it!) about nanoscience and nanotechnology. Here are the panelists:
Rudy Baum is the Editor-in-Chief of Chemical & Engineering News.
David M. Berube is author of Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz and the Nano-Hype blog . He is a Professor of Speech Communication Studies and Government-Industry Coordinator of Nanoscience and Technology Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Richard A. L. Jones is author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life and the Soft Machines blog . He is Professor of…
jstemwedel | January 9, 2007There was an interesting story today on Morning Edition about new research on potential bias in nutrition studies funded by industry. Dr. David Ludwig of Children's Hospital in Boston led a team that analyzed 206 nutritional studies published between 1999 and 2003. More than half of these studies were at least partially industry-funded (in particular, funded by purveyors of milk, fruit juices, and soft drinks).
Ludwig's analysis of this body of literature had one set of researchers look at the 206 nutritional studies just from the point of view of their scientific conclusions (with no…