A Hippocratic Oath For Scientists 366
grrlscientist writes "In response to what appears to be a growing problem of scientific misconduct, a group of people at the Institute of Medical Science at University of Toronto in Canada wrote a scientist's version of the Hippocratic oath. This oath (which is cited in the story) was recited by all graduate students in the biological sciences at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year." This blogger argues that merely reciting an oath is not going to help much when "...the corruption in 'science' is systemic. It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model instead of in accordance to an educational paradigm. It is due to unrestrained corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income..."
Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying we should replace the hippocratic oath with a pretty picture ?
Perhaps we simply need criminal sentences for breaking any part of the hippocratic oath. There are obviously problems with that : the democrats will never agree. You cannot take the hippocratic oath and do an abortion or euthanasia, it's out of the question. So that would, by itself, criminalize (and I believe that in the original interpretation would make executing either abortion or euthanasia punishable by death by poisoning, at least that was the ancient Greek way of dealing with violations of the Hippocratic oath)
Basically the problem is that today's scientists feel totalitarian : they feel entitled to push their view on the data. Obviously both abortion and euthanasia harm patients. You could perhaps defend stopping a treatment, ie disconnecting life-giving equipment as compliant with the hippocratic oath, but euthanasia by actively terminating someone's life does not qualify as "doing no harm".
The problem is a lot more simple : it is simply not possible to agree on a moral standard with people who have no morals. Until we fix that "little issue", no oath, and certainly no pretty picture, will help.
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Sometimes killing someone is "doing no harm", and hiding behind rigid ideas *is* harmful. Sometimes and abortion *is* the right thing to do. There is always a question - which involves engaging ones morale compass, and necessitates a cultivation of insight into who you are, and what life is.
A follower of the hippocratic oath does not perform acts of euthanasia or abortion, and that's because the oath places
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Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It does not in the hippocratic oath, perhaps you should read it.
(Human) life is valued above all else, and specifically it is valued OVER comfort.
Therefore it is a VERY stretched interpretation that you'll need to allow passive euthanasia. Abortion : terminating one human life for the comfort of another is a definite, loud NO for the hippocratic oath.
As is active (and let's be honest, passive too) euthanasia.
Here's the text (which you haven't read) :
...
I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.
To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death.
Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.
But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts.
I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.
In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.
All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.
Note that this leaves one thing open that you're going to disagree with : it indeed allows doctors to carry out the death penalty (even in cases where they do not necessarily agree with the verdict).
Still in favor of the hippocratic oath ? I know I am though.
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You forgot something:
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And the usual $64,000 question:
While the skin cells have around 0% chance of growing into a functioning human, the fetus stands a better one. Precisely at which point does it become a "person"? Birth? Age 2? 4?
Jus' sayin'....
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't life in a black and white world. Get over it.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, one could also argue that it's the involuntary removal of life that is the greatest harm
That would be my stance.
But we are a society. We must make a clear decision on what is worse: suffering or death.
I don't think that my society has the right to choose between my suffering or my death. I see that as one's own personal decision; or it should be, at any rate.
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Myocardial infarctions? Nasty.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. An oath does nothing if the person giving the oath has no morals to begin with.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd solve more problems by making MBAs take an ethics oath. It is usually these guys that are driving people to do unethical things in government, research, corporations, etc.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Funny)
You'd solve more problems by taking all MBAs and offer them a smoke.
In front of a wall.
Facing a firing squad.
MartRe:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wondered at the time what could be done about this and whether it would help to write a small open source data-faking program, which would generate random results in line with the what the researcher wanted to find. By making it blatantly easy to massage/fake results (which was rife with the students writing their dissertations and faintly rumoured regarding certain staff), the problem would be hard to ignore as everyone would be under suspicion.
Obviously this won't make it possible to spot essentially undetectable faked results, but it might place more pressure on scientists to make their results truly verifiable and start a (possibly panicked) discussion about how to maintain credibility, which seeems to currently be based largely on the assumption of good character.
Or then again I may just be bitter about doing my research properly and not having taken the easy route like everyone else on the course.
Aargh! Damn Psychology!
[grasps head]
Can't...
stop...
analysing....
Gnnnh!
There is already a way to handle this (Score:3, Informative)
it's called peer review.
If you hide the detail of your experiment, it's no good, if no one can reproduce your results, it's no good.
If your day relies on a piece of evidence that has 'disappeared' it's called into question
It works very well, and it's how frauds are caught.
It's there because everyone knows there are biases, and the main think the scientific method does is weed out bias by showing it to many qualified people.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was spoken: It is due to unrestrained corporate greed...
There is no such thing as corporate greed. Just as there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather, there are exploiters and vices which thrive in the vacuum created by weaknesses of the human soul. The belief that human greed in the world can be defeated by replacing corporations with other structures is fallacious.
Re:Well, I don't see why not ... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey now, the president has already taken a Hypocritic Oath or whatever that thingamaggie is called.
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Graduate school is too late to begin teaching this (Score:5, Insightful)
If they aren't told that what is "slightly unethical behavior" in an undergraduate lab course is "dangerously unethical and likely criminal" behavior when practiced in the real world, how are they to know?
The punishment for "fudging" lab data as an undergraduate should be failure on the assignment. The punishment for a graduate student TA who suggests that fudging lab data on an assignment is OK should be immediate expulsion.
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The problem is that otherwise ethical students are being taught to fudge their data in undergraduate labs. They are often told directly by their TAs to find out what the correct answer is and work backwards from there.
I've never been told by a TA to find the answer and work backwards, but YMM(and apparently has)V(ied). As a TA myself it doesn't matter if a student knows the answer, in fact it is often useful that they already do know the answer (from lectures). Aren't Labs about learning the practical skills? That's how we run them (nb. Chemistry labs YMMV in other fields).
As for people fudging data, in the labs I currently work in as a grad student I have come accross obviously fudged results in a dissertation I was
Re:Graduate school is too late to begin teaching t (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never been told by a TA to find the answer and work backwards
It doesn't have to be that blatant. In my undergrad chem labs, we were marked based on how well we ran the experiments, with the relative success based on the yield we got. So accurately reporting that we got 50% yield was enough to pass the lesson, barely. We quickly learned that doubling the reagent volumes, without reporting that we had done so, would bring our yields up to the 80-90% range we needed to get a good mark. So, without ever being explicitly told to cheat, we learned that cheating was valued over truthful reporting and acted accordingly.
In a way, this is very much in keeping with the way science is practiced. Failed experiments, well run and accurately written up, do not get published. We are rewarded for our results (true or false), not our ability as experimenters.
In my botany labs, if an experiment failed (i.e., the plant died) I reported that truthfully, and was marked based on the quality of the report, not the actual outcome of the experiment. This was reflective of the quality of teaching in our botany department as a whole, and one reason why I'm a botanist today.
yp.
Re:Graduate school is too late to begin teaching t (Score:5, Interesting)
The best lesson I ever had came from a basic chemistry lab class in highschool.
We were given a packet that contained the whole process for some experiment we were to run that would end up telling us how much of each component was in a mix. It had an exact, step-by-step protocol for the experiment with measures, timing, etc. all spelled out, as well as blanks for us to put our quantities in. At the end, in the analysis section, it had the "right" answers already printed there, along with blanks for our answers.
Our teams began and the teacher and her assistants left the room. A few minutes later, we all started noticing that the results we were getting were not what we "should" be getting, according to the booklet. A few teams decided to have each member (there were 3 per team) run each experiment individually and then checking our results against each other in order to see if we were screwing up in the process. Some of the other teams just decided to keep going, write down the "wrong" answers and hand in those reports. And the rest decided to just ignore the results they got and write in answers that were close to the "right" ones but were completely fabricated.
The teacher and her assistants come back and get everyone to turn in their packets, and are pleasantly surprised that some teams did the whole replication thing (which, it turned out, all of our results agreed with each other and disagreed with the packet). Then they announce: for today's exercise, anyone who submitted answers that agreed with the packet would fail. It was impossible to get the results printed in the packet by any possible iteration of the experiment that was listed, so anyone who claimed results in agreement with the packet was clearly lying. Everyone else - who wrote down the honest results - passed, and we got extra credit for doing the replication test. The lab that day was to show us the importance of honesty in research.
We then spent the remainder of the session discussing what "wrong" answers mean in science, how things that don't match expectations may, at the least, point out a simple mistake in calculations or experimental technique but might, in other cases, point to something wholly new and interesting. "I have found it!" is a nice thing to hear in science, but all the REALLY good stuff comes after, "Huh, that's odd..."
Anyway, I hate chemistry because I'm too much of a fumble-fingers with the equipment, but I'm now a researcher (psychology) and I've taken those lessons to heart. In my lab, we work on several areas that are considered controversial (effects of individual background differences on interactions etc). I spent the last academic year working on a project that wound up yielding a null-result, and so that's what we reported and eventually got published. Was it sexy? No - a validation of the status quo isn't nearly as thrilling as exposing something new. But it was honest, it was "important" in the sense that it lent validation to processes already in place, and that's cool.
Re:Graduate school is too late to begin teaching t (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Graduate school is too late to begin teaching t (Score:4, Interesting)
2.As someone with a decade of life sciences college work under my belt I've never been told to work backwards from the answer by a TA or professor.
3. As a researcher with over 20 unique research trials under my belt I've never seen evidence of "Fudging" data by any of the 30 or so other grad-students I've worked with over the past 6 years.
During the course of my own research I've had to repeat several studies because we couldn't make heads or tails of the results, but we've never faked the data or published data we knew to be false. I have to admit that we did have to argue with a company when submitting a manuscript containing research they'd paid for. We had submitted to them a preliminary report of the results. They published the results of that report as if definitive. Over the course of writing the manuscript we found some errors in our statistical analysis of the results and corrected them. This changed the results quantitatively, but the overall conclusions remained the same. They wanted us to go with the old results because they'd already published them and made suggestions to clients based on them. However, we simply indicated that if they didn't want us to publish the new number we'd simply refuse to put our names on the manuscript. Since the reason that companies perform their research at universities is to give the picture of being independent, and without mine or my Professors names the only remaining author would be a member of the company that sells the product we were testing, they were forced to back down and the manuscript was submitted with the most accurate results we had.
I don't think they were evil, just trying to save face after making the mistake of believing that the preliminary report was 100% accurate. That's the reason for Peer Review, Independent analysis by Universities on behalf of the obviously biased funding agencies. Remember, this is the only situation I've come across of this sort in 6 years of graduate research and it was a lot less dramatic than it sounds like written here.
Re:Graduate school is too late to begin teaching t (Score:4, Interesting)
I see a lot of posts from TAs/grad students about endemic data-fudging beginning in undergraduate courses. While I never got that impression when I was teaching, I certainly can see it coming from the top down so to speak.
The modern tenure/funding structure goes something like this: work your tail off and hope that you can meet the right people, expose yourself to the right ideas, and come up with the right proposals to get a job as an assistant professor at a good research university. You'll be hired based on your perceived ability to procure grant money before your start-up runs out which really has nothing to do with science and everything to do with what is being funding (e.g., in my arena everyone is tacking "photovoltaic" onto their proposals despite knowing very little about the topic) by the DOD, DOE, NSF, and NIH.
Now you have our job and the clock starts ticking--in 5-7 years you'd better have established a "vigorous independent research program" which is political-speak for "consistent funding" and on top of that you need to become respected within a community of scientists. This latter part is very important because you can't fudge your way into this; the community that cares about and reviews your publications will wedge open any cracks they see. Your tenure committee will basically phone these people up and say "hey do you know prof. X? Is he/she any good?".
Here's the rub; the relative value placed on these two factors--money and being well-respected in a community--depends on the institution. Some state legislatures don't like to fund universities because their constituents look at "scientists" and see nuclear weapons, drugs that kill people, etc., and take a very negative view (this is, incidentally, why the NSF puts so much emphasis on education--it is the only way to get congress to continue funding them). Thus too much emphasis is placed on money, the peer-review system breaks down, and scientific ethics start looking more like business ethics.
Now you have a young professor being pressured to publish, publish, publish (or perish) in order to get money, money, money. This professor is, depending on the institution, handed 1-5 first year graduate students and perhaps a postdoc (which is a total grab-bag) with which to make or break his/her career (in the form of tenure).
Imagine that these graduate students took the sort of classes discussed in this thread where the emphasis was (incorrectly) placed on getting the "right" answer instead of getting to an answer the right way. Their boss--the stressed out young professor--is breathing down their neck and getting snippy because they aren't in the lab on Saturday morning.
What do you think is going to happen? Obviously a lot of this comes down the management skills of the professor, the "quality" of the research (i.e., they get lucky), and the character of the graduate students. Probably 99% of the time either the fudging just doesn't matter because the work is low-profile and never gets repeated, or everyone is super-ethical and things are as they should be. The other 1% of the time you read about a relatively young professor that earned tenure through some wild success that turned out to be totally fraudulent. Of course, due to the slow pace of science, it has been years, the data are lost, and the grad students graduated, so often people throw their hands in the air and claim plausible deniability.
And sometimes people are just unethical. In any case, there is a systemic breakdown in the peer-review process that is driven largely by policy decisions that affect the funding models for public research. Too much emphasis is placed on publishing and the link between being successful in your career and being a good scientist is being eroded by narrowly-targeted funding models.
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I think that interpretation is because undergraduate students don't have the experience to understand what is being asked of them. A good experiment should state assumptions, background theory, experiment design, data, and interpretation. Often undergraduates will modify the data rather tha
Doctors vs. Scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Doctors vs. Scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
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there are legal consequences as it is, a scientist's lab notebook is considered a legal document,
Not really. Just about the only time it becomes relevant is to establish patent ownership.
fudging/lying in this case is already something that has legal consequences.
I doubt it. Lying isn't illegal (in most cases). Lying on your government grant results is illegal in many jurisdictions. It's hard to prove the difference between fraud & error.
I would imagine that any break of such an oath as the one mentioned
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Re:Doctors vs. Scientists (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify what I think you're saying in a way that may be relevant to the grandparent post, the notebook is not a legal document by simple virtue of being a "scientist's notebook." Rather, a lab notebook can be a legally significant document in some legal proceedings. It is only of value in this context if you can demonstrate a consistent adherence to certain standards.
For example, if you are attempting to overturn someone else's patent due to your own prior work, your notebook describing and dating your ideas/tests may be of value. If you're able to produce a career's worth of similar notebooks describing your other work, that will lend credibility to the contents of your notebook.
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They have to give their card back.
Re:Doctors vs. Scientists (Score:5, Informative)
Well currently you're likely to get banned from getting federal grant money and blacklisted with journals, so for all practical purposes you are totally screwed unless you have a few hundred grand lying around to fund your own work.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath [wikipedia.org]
Although mostly of historical and traditional value, the oath is considered a rite of passage for practitioners of medicine, although it is not obligatory and no longer taken up by all physicians.
I don't think that violating the actual oath means you can no longer practice medicine. However, there are some parts of it that may put your legal status at risk, as well as some things outside of it (like doctor-patient confidentiality).
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To quote the oath (Score:4, Informative)
"Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy."
Re:To quote the oath (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To quote the oath (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that is more in line with changes in ethics than science.
A majority used to think abortion was bad (tho oddly not leaving the child out to die if it wasn't wanted or torturing people in front of children). Now a 50/50 or even 55/45 split exists.
Re:To quote the oath (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that abortion is morally wrong because it destroys the life of the fetus is a reason invented to keep the law in place retrospectively. It was not the intent of those who put the laws into place.
When Hippocrates invented his eponymous oath, most Greeks were okay with abortion. Its banning of abortion was so odd, in fact, that it prompted some scholars on that basis alone to associate the oath with Pythagoreanism, the one strand of ancient Greek thought known to ban it entirely.
Re:To quote the oath (Score:4, Informative)
Abortion presented a lot of risks to the mother back in those days so generally the way to get rid of an unwanted (or unhealthy) baby was infanticide by exposure. In fact, the Greeks were hardly alone as a culture in their use of infanticide [deathreference.com].
Re:To quote the oath (Score:4, Insightful)
No. But just because so-and-so intelligent Greek said it, and not such-and-such other intelligent Greek said it doesn't make it objectively valid anyways. I'm not getting into the abortion debate, but the Hippocratic oath is probably the weakest argument for or against abortion.
Morally wrong != government should forbid (Score:5, Insightful)
Morally wrong is not an all or nothing question though. Some would think it's morally wrong on the level of killing a baby, others that it was morally wrong but of very minor importance, and some would be scattered everywhere between.
Many of those who see it as morally wrong (particularly if they see it as a relatively minor offense) nonetheless do not think that government should forbid it or punish those who obtain or perform it. I may have the opinion that billboards advertising cigarettes are morally wrong, or that certain forms of hate speech are morally wrong, or that extramarital sex is morally wrong, but that does not imply that I support a government ban on those things. Morality and legality are and should be separate concepts. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my set of morals is the one absolute true way, nor am I convinced that a government ban is always a productive and effective response even if something really is immoral.
I expect that you'd get vastly different responses to the question 'is abortion bad?' or the question 'should agents of the government imprison people who get or perform abortions?' Nuance, however, does not win votes or make for good sound bites.
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No, but if the significant majority of people did believe any or all those things were morally wrong, then possibly the government should ban it. Of course, the water gets muddied when people believe that the government banning anything is, in itself, an immor
One good reason? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I pledge not to be a shill or tool (Score:5, Insightful)
You will notice that the original Hipocratic oath was about serving the patient/sick, and didn't include anything about influence by outside parties. You will also notice that this oath is about influence of outside parties, and doesn't include anything about serving science.
How times have changed.
Not much difference (Score:5, Insightful)
If you put your cause first (patients or science), then those external influences lose their power.
Re:I pledge not to be a shill or tool (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I was more caught by the blogger's throwaway remarks about "corporate science". The truth in my experience is that academics exaggerate to get grants and manipulate data to publish papers. For instance, a substantial fraction of chemistry research cannot be reproduced because the results shown are a fluke, and the applications of an idea are often grossly exaggerated. For instance, some scientists invented a new alloy [caltech.edu] which they suggest will revolutionize crumple-zones in cars. This alloy includes palladium, a rare-metal. Indeed so rare, if all the palladium on earth were to be used to make this new alloy, we'd get about a cubic meter of the stuff.
You just don't get away with this sort of stuff in industry. For instance the famous Bell Labs scientist who falsified his nanotech research [wikipedia.org]. This was then discovered by a competing group at IBM. In industry, scientific fraud is hard b.c. the standards for research go beyond publishing a few page journal article.
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The whole "corporate science" rubbish... well, it has some truth to it, but the truth is a universal one--people everywhere lie for personal gain, corporations and individuals alike, whether for fame or profit.
The finger-pointing to corporations is a political one. There's a political agenda here, one that is frighteningly enough taking hold of the entire world.
The world is heading towards a collectivist mindset, and the idea of profit is increasingly being viewed as an evil, and of course individualism is
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Re:I pledge not to be a shill or tool (Score:5, Informative)
For instance, some scientists invented a new alloy [caltech.edu] which they suggest will revolutionize crumple-zones in cars. This alloy includes palladium, a rare-metal. Indeed so rare, if all the palladium on earth were to be used to make this new alloy, we'd get about a cubic meter of the stuff.
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Like those tobacco studies industry did in the 70s and 80s. Paragons of virtue, they are.
I'm also sure nobody who cooks up something interesting in an industry lab has EVER suggested to their boss that it might be good for something without carefully considering every aspect of the claim. Certainly a corporation would never oversell or misrepresent a product or technique, either to the public or in an official document, like a patent application, for example.
Wrong about Palladium (Score:3, Informative)
Palladium isn't that rare...
"The global production from mines was 222 metric tons in 2006 according to USGS data.[6] Most palladium is used for catalytic converters in the automobile industry."-wikipedia
Besides global warming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where's the corruption in science besides when the government pays scientists to give them the desired bias in their research? Honest question, I just have no idea.
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Vioxx anyone?
Too many others to count, really. FDA approval for things that never should be put in the human body. Somebody paid somebody to satisfy somebody. Countless studies done so as to not hurt corporate profits on a product they have invested millions in, no matter what the actual consequences to people.
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Are you serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhvHB62ph8&NR=1 [youtube.com]
"After a thorough examination of every member of the group, the medical specialist stated, 'It is my opinion, that the ears, nose, throat, and accessory organs of all participating subjects examined by me were not adversely affected in the six months period by smoking the cigarettes provided.' Remember this report, and buy Chesterfields. Regular, or King Size. Premium quality Chesterfields. Much milder!"
I'm sure for plausible deniability they paid someone to produce that report. Science has been subverted by power, so that it is used to reinforce belief systems instead of producing new facts about the universe. But it's been going on since science existed at all.
Nothing new under the sun, right?
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Personally, I'd rather be an unknown but ethical scientist than release sensational results, claiming more statistical confidence than I was certain of. You sleep better at night knowing that if anyone checks u
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I wonder how many people went down the same path, realized they did NOT have cold fusion, and (ethically) didn't fudge results to make it look like they did? As with anything else, it's the bad seeds that drag everything down for the majority. And as with anything else, the protections (e.g. a silly oath) will only matter to the people who are already telling the truth.
So in short, I agree. :p
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Where's the corruption in science besides when the government pays scientists to give them the desired bias in their research? Honest question, I just have no idea.
When corporations use NDAs to suppress findings that threaten their business model.
The scientists of the Big Tobacco corporations knew long ago just how toxic their products were, but they didn't publish those findings. That way the corps got to keep raking in the cash, while thousands of families lost their loved ones early to an incredibly painful and quite avoidable ailment.
You seem to suffer from an ideological position that governments are always bad, and private enterprises are always good. Please ad
What about for CS and engineering? (Score:2)
I pledge to not release any code which I have not tested or have reason to believe is incorrect and/or incomplete, unless such code is clearly marked as "Alpha." I further pledge not to use such unreliable and untested code in any projects for public consumption, without ensuring that th
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I joined the order of the engineer. We also took a pledge at graduation that was based on the Engineer's Creed. Engineers also have state licenses which can be revoked for bad practices.
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well, making that a requirement would certainly take microsoft out of the equasion.
comming soon, Windows: alpha
Re:What about for CS and engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
[I once considered a "hobo code" for programmers--obscure symbols that you could mark code or an office with that would mean things like
- this project is doomed,
- this project is likely to incur a loss of $100 million as it fails,
- this project will get people killed,
- I would be fired if I told the truth about this project,
- I would be killed if I told the truth about this project,
- etc.,
as a warning to other prospective programmers. And yes--I have worked on some really awful projects.]Party on (Score:5, Funny)
Observation: I am not involved in "ethical research."
Hypothesis: The rest of that sentence does not apply to me.
Conclusion: Never been a better time to be an evil scientist. >:-)
mealy mouthed gibberish (Score:5, Insightful)
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And me without mod points.
Well-said. Anyone who thinks theirs is the only right and true and just cause, free from the stain of human fallibility, is setting themselves up for one heck of a fall. A better oath might go "I pledge to adjust my conclusions to fit the data, not the other way around, even when my funding's on the line."
I doubt we'll have a stampede of scientists willing to follow that oath, though.
Good science has *always* rocked the boat, forcing us to look at our world in new ways. It's not a
You can't be serious (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI The oath:
"I won't let profit cloud my judgement, even though profit is the foundation of my existence."
Re:You can't be serious (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst thing about it is that quite often the profit motive is what makes people's bosses call them out on their self serving bullshit. If you look at companies where people can't be fired their bosses have much less ability to do that. And the end result is that people can talk their way out of doing anything except for their pet project which doesn't have any customers, or any users except for them and their friends. Everyone knows that it's bullshit, but because they can't be fired people know it's a bad idea to say anything.
Much like academia, really.
Seriosly, I'm sick of Americans/Canadians and people from capitalist countries whining on about how the profit motive corrupts things without having experienced a world where it is severly attenuated. Move to Sweden, work in a company there for a while and see how well it works.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
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If you can't find the line between financial gain, competitiveness and clouding of your judgement you have a problem with ethics.
A lot of people seem to have a problem with ethics.
Ethics are about making the right decision, even when it hurts. It isn't about making an easy decision at a convenient time.
Hmm. quibbles with the oath. (Score:4, Insightful)
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition
>> ambition is what drives a lot of scientists. I want to do this first, not second.
>> of course many scientists want financial gain. I want to be frikkin rich just like anyone else that works their tail end off for 20 years. Why should a scientist be uniquely sacrificial of their personal well-being. At the least, their professors and universities expect to be paid back the up to 400,000 dollar tuitions.
cloud my judgment in the conduct of
>>ethical: This word is very hard to define in a stable fashion. Things that were ethical only 20 years ago are now unethical. Things that were unethical 20 years ago became ethical (in part because people just kept doing them)
research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good,
but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars
>> Scientists have forever competed. Hmm I've discovered a new truth that will absolutely destroy an entire wing of science. I better not let that out since I don't want to do something to the detriment of those guys.
of which I am now a member.
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Pointless and even harmful to those fools who might be tricked into following it.
The only statement I might take out of it is..
I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good.
But "greater good" is still a little hard to define.
Different societies have wildly different definitions of what constitutes the greater good (along "do we consider clan/family/individual most important" and along other lines as well.
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And not to sound like a republican, but the entire thing sound a bit communistic too- especially the part about financial gain.
So it is couched in communistic/left leaning values to begin with.
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I don't think the oath precludes one from pursuing financial gain. It seems to state that one would not abandon their ethics in that pursuit. There's nothing in that part that would contravene capitalism, unless you only think capitalism can survive in the most primitive, barbaric, dog-eat-dog environment.
The rest of it is poorly worded, though, I'll grant you that. I'd be curious if they meant "detriment" to mean only "physical" detriment; eg, they wouldn't participate in the Tuskegee experiment.
Alternative wording? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thoughtless article. (Score:4, Interesting)
What widespread lack of ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. No evidence of substantive misuse exists. There is substantive proof of bias (particularly against women succeeding.) This is not scientific fraud. Just scientists being arseholes and using their power to diminish the lives of others.
2. More reporting of fraud is likely these days. More reporters, and lots of web search engines for them to use. But consider the activity base. Back in the days when I was a scientist, there were about 1 per 1000 of the population. At a guess then, say 2 million scientists in the world right now. (The definition of one will vary, so no exact number is possible.) Even at a absurdly low rate of 1 per 1000 being crooked, that's 2000 bent scientists. Get real. Of course there are a whole bunch of them out there. So what. Do you expect them to be inhuman. Not that would be really horrible.
3. The oath is a wishy washy load of idealistic crap. "I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member." What species do they think scientists belong to. The astonishing thing in my experience was that scientists were far more ethical than people had any right to expect. The oath allows you to be a complete bastard provided you are engaged in non-thical research and scholarship. It also expects a group driven above all by curiosity to instead be driven by the 'common good'. Well, the atomic bomb was invented for the common good. (Albeit, the common good of one side in a war, but the majority of both sides of the war agreed with having such a bias.)
4. The oath will achieve nothing. There are already punitive measures in place. Get caught even mildly fudging you data and you cease to be a scientist. For ever. You may get a job washing glassware, but you can forget any position of authority.
5. I do think the measures in place are inadequate. In the main, they rely on checking on how believable a submitted paper is (peer review), and then whether the science survives. The equivalent of an environmental impact report does not exist. The best you could hope for say, if someone discovered a simple way of isolating out uranium 235 for instance, would be for someone to exterminate the idiot. Do not expect the science community to do it for you. But scientists do have ethics committees, particularly governing the use of animals. They were really picky. (As I got older, I agreed with them.) It wasn't sufficient just to be treating your animals well. The requirement was that you interfere to the least extent possible. Considering science is agnostic, they were in the main, ethical.
Excuse the rant. Science is about as safe as guns in the community. Strong opinions are not only expected, they should be expressed. But please get my key point. It is much safer having scientists being human than following 'the common good'. The common good will be defined by either a religious power group or a political one. I'd rather have scientists caring for the people around them, and being restricted in their ability to casually affect the lives of others.
Communist Rant (Score:4, Insightful)
The authors conclusion that corporate science should be modeled on academics to prevent corruption is patently absurd. There is plenty of corruption in academics, and it is exactly the same kind of corruption. Scientists will try to misrepresent the their data in order to gain publication, notoriety, and additional funding. This is exactly the same gamble that corporate scientists take, knowing that there is a possibility that further research will support their hypotheses, they would rather move forward than give up entirely. For the record, most corporate CEOs would probably rather have accurate data too. It's much more expensive to have a failed project than a thousand lawsuits. But no one wants to wake up one day and find out they've spent the last 5 years chasing a dead end.
I agree that an oath won't help with the situation, but bizarre funding structures won't help wither, because the problem isn't the money, it's the nature of scientific investigation. Perhaps we should just be more diligent in the peer-review process.
Please ignore all the errors (Score:2)
Good but not enough (Score:2)
speaking as a scientist...... (Score:4, Interesting)
What utter, utter politically correct (pc) bullshit. No really.
Anyone who tries to adhere to an oath of this type will find themselves immediately at risk of following the pc trendies to mediocrity.
Want to know how many of our most important scientists were unethical dicks at one time or another? Quite a few. Its just like in business, it's a rare mind that manages to reach the top of their field and leave no nastiness in their history.
Even my hero, Feynman, worked on the atomic bomb. You can't get away from the fact that he helped kill two cities, and yet he was such a great bloke.
Going back in history a bit, Newton was known for being a nasty piece of work at times.
I know that lots of people will be thinking about the Nazi scientists, but if you believe for one second that an oath would have stopped them, I have one piece of information for you. Most of those scientists were medical doctors who'd taken the Hippocratic oath...
Look, if your going to be a barstard, all an oath will do is make the pc crowd more easy to fool.
Priorities... (Score:2, Insightful)
surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised i haven't seen a post about what should be so blindingly obvious ...
A scientist's only oath need be the scientific method. If their behaviour or research can't stand up to that, then it's immediately suspect, invalid, unethical, and unscientific. Any other extraneous oath or pledge is just meaningless words, recited to make someone (who?) feel better. If a scientist won't live up to following through the scientific method, i fail to see how a silly bunch of (wow, overly-longwinded) words will make any difference.
purity of hypothesis-theory-data (Score:2)
Anyone read this tripe? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is horseshit. A very big pile.
Quote from article: "I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member."
That "never to the detriment of supervisors" has me stuck. What if you discover something that will unseat your supervisor. Sometimes science surprises you.
The oath itself is corrupt. (Score:3, Insightful)
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
ROTFL!
This oath itself is corrupt.
And it is weightless.
This kindof reminds the UN agreement on human rights, which states that no human rights need apply at all, if they conflict with the goals of the UN.
In this case, knowledge should not be pursued if it is to the detriment of colleagues (how special they are)!
This is a case of what G.K. Chesterton calls "professionalism" -- giving a pass in corruption to people of one's own profession, where it would never otherwise be acceptable in society.
If anything, science is already far too professional (in the Chesterton sense). Theories that have good foundation are ignored if they aren't presented by a Ph.D. Papers that are utter nonsense or jargon are accepted to journals as academically acceptable. Nobel prizes (superconductivity, anyone?) are awarded to those who *did not* discover the science, because they happened to be on top of the local political structure at the time.
Scientist's Three Commandments: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Truth comes first.
2. Everything else comes second.
3. When in doubt, return to Rule 1.
No need to talk about corporations, financial gain, competition, and all that other crap. Use these three rules and you're golden.
Agreed (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with oaths is that the fact that you have to take one implies that you would not do the right thing otherwise. In fact, saying it almost implies that you intend to break it (kind of like the way you know not to trust someone when they say "you can trust me"). Yeah, we can pass on the whole oath thing. Lets just practice honesty and professionalism in all of our endeavors.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Pure capitalism is not inherently immoral; it does not "coerce", per se; it simply allows individuals to make decisions.
The worst parts of pure capitalism are simply that it may cause large monopolies, which doesn't so much hurt people as it may simply slow down a field by inflating prices or causing products and services to be less than what they would have been in a competitive arena. Such monopolies can be toppled though as others may seek higher quality products/services at a premium from a smaller bus
Re:Corporate greed????? or did you mean inovation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Er... Child labor, slave labor, wage caps based on non-performance metrics (race, sex, gender, etc...)... All of these are natural in pure capitalism, since there are no constraints, and it rewards people for being unethical. Being a sociopath is a BENEFIT to good capitalists, anything where this is true, doesn't sound ideal to me. Capitalism is based on exploitation, and put the individuals good above all others. This, to me, is rather towards the immoral side.
Capitalism is also prone to concentrate wealth on one end, while keeping the other end at the lowest profitable level. Which, also, is suboptimal.
Pure socialism (or as you called it "communism")is just as distasteful, of course. There is a nice mix somewhere in the middle that ensures the greatest good for the greatest number.
I think all strata of society has equal worth as beings, and that corporations should be forced to pay their equal share (since this is antithema to the model of capitalism, I say force), and they should be forced to maintain the ethical rigor of the community.
Economy is a tool that should be chained to the greater good, and not an ends in itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:it's all about money (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was taking a behavioral research course I ran into 2 points which I considered outliers (about 4 SD outside the average), I spend a long time pondering what to do with them. I finally threw them out in terms of the main research, but was very careful to included them into the study, making it very clear what they were, my reasoning, and their quantity (32-5ms for example).
Later I found out that I'd be perfectly fine tossing them, since they were so aberrant, and totally tossed the study (the stats wouldn't be representative), and the previous research.
So sometimes tossing outliers is fine, it just require A LOT of caution, and a healthy degree of disclosure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No one in their right mind would withhold a cure for cancer. Even if they were entirely self interested, the notoriety and financial rewards would be immense.
Do you understand the concept of justice? (Score:3, Insightful)
Was it just me, or did anyone else detect more than just a bit of personal bitterness on the part of the author of TFA? [. . .] She may have a point about scientists at pharmaceutical companies being motivated to publish only "positive" results, but her rhetoric makes it seem just as likely to me that she simply harbors a grudge against anyone with steady employment.
Heck, I harbor a grudge against Bush and his cronies for messing up the economy I have to live in. Are you suggesting that my being affected