I have a colleague from a former Soviet block country who honestly can’t understand the whole notion of compliance. When forced to face such issues (e.g. employee safety, laboratory animal use, chemical storage) he quite sincerely throws up his hands and attributes to the enforcers of such rules, the characteristics of the nameless soviet apparatchik–“do they want a bribe,” he wonders?
Compliance is absolutely critical to the safe and ethical conduct of basic cognitive research. Too many graduate students are trained in such a way that they view these procedures as a unnecessary burden on their day to day research. I have, over the course of my own training, heard many times the view that to be a really “intense” bench-top scientist, it’s almost desirable to flaunt the rules. Such is the road to disaster. You don’t carefully balance a centrifuge on that midnight run and the next thing you know there is P32 all over the room. You don’t have an approved protocol for that experiment that you just thought up and the next thing you know, laboratory animal-based research is suspended at your institution.
Compliance is best practice in research. It’s extraordinarily important to take it seriously.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 