My father’s colleague, Charles Gross of Princeton, has written a superb piece in The Nation about the Marc Hauser case. It’s here.
Besides a discussion of the facts of the now famous scientific misconduct case, there is an excellent general discussion of scientific misconduct and a beautiful description of a typical lab ecosystem.
From The Economist, here. From the article, it all started this way:
ANIL POTTI, Joseph Nevins and their colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, garnered widespread attention in 2006. They reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they could predict the course of a patient’s lung cancer using devices called expression arrays, which log the activity patterns of thousands of genes in a sample of tissue as a colourful picture (see above). A few months later, they wrote in Nature Medicine that they had developed a similar technique which used gene expression in laboratory cultures of cancer cells, known as cell lines, to predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer.
What follows is really sad.
I haven’t commented to date on the case of prominent Harvard cognitive scientist Marc Hauser basically out of respect for the investigatory process. However with the report of Harvard FAS Dean Michael Smith here, I think it’s time to weigh in, at least to the general issue of scientific misconduct, without commenting on the specifics of the Hauser case itself.
Any case of scientific misconduct is both sad and at the same time extremely serious. The progress of science requires, from all investigators, the highest levels of professional conduct. From my perspective these include the active prohibition against: falsification of data, fabrication of data and plagiarism (FFP as we teach it to graduate students).
Any example of a scientist, particularly a very prominent one, being found to be guilty of scientific misconduct erodes the web of trust between scientists themselves, and as importantly between scientists and the public which funds science through their tax dollars.
Here’s news of a disturbing trend: scientists are apparently taking to photoshopping their images.
Money quote:
One new check on science images, though, is the blogosphere. As more papers are published in open-access journals, an informal group of watchdogs has emerged online.
“There’s a lot of folks who in their idle moments just take a good look at some figures randomly,” says John E. Dahlberg, director of the division of investigative oversight at the Office of Research Integrity. “We get allegations almost weekly involving people picking up problems with figures in grant applications or papers.”
Such online watchdogs were among those who first identified problems with images and other data in a cloning paper published in Science by Woo Suk Hwang, a South Korean researcher. The research was eventually found to be fraudulent, and the journal retracted the paper.
Katrina L. Kelner, deputy editor of life sciences at Science, argues that the level of fabrication in the Hwang paper was so pervasive that it would not have been detected even if the journal had used the latest image-checking tools.
Since that instance, however, the journal has started spot-checking images in every paper before publication.
Jim
At a recent meeting, several colleagues raised the point that for whatever reason, new faculty members may not be as aware of what constitutes scientific misconduct as previous generations of professors. It seems that there are two clusters of the confused: 1) those for whom the US definition (and I’ll get to that in a bit) is obscure because they were trained in other countries where the “rules” may be different and 2) US trained faculty members who may be under the impression that the “rules” are somehow relaxed for less formal contributions (such as blogs).
The sense among my colleagues was that it is very important for both of the clusters that the word get out–scientific misconduct can get you very quickly into a whole lot of trouble.
So what constitutes scientific misconduct? It’s useful to remember the mnemonic FFP (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism). Fabrication is the making up of experimental data. Falsification is the changing of experimental data. Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work (usually written) without giving them proper credit.
It’s never OK to do anything of these things.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 