Ethics & Scientific ResearchOctober 2014

Clark WolfIowa State Universityjwcwolf@iastate.edu

Ethics in Science?

Macro-Ethics: Social/Ethical issues in research and the development of new technologies…

Ethics in Science? Ethical issues in

the uses of new technologies…

Ethics in Science?

Ethical issues involved in the policies that regulate the uses of new technology…

Many moral objections to science and technology are silly.

Does this mean that it’s silly to consider ethical issues in science and technology?

Ethics in Science?

Ethical issues in the practice of scientific research… (RCR)

I. Ethics in Life Science Research

1) Why should you Care? 2) Standards for Scientific Research:

FFP & MIM3) Ethics, Values, and Choices4) Controversial Case: Arsenate Bacteria5) Risk Factors for Research Misconduct? 6) Case Studies and Questions

Why should you be interested?

Good science requires ethically responsible research practice.

There are good reasons behind the rules governing the responsible conduct of research.

Within the scientific community, ethical misconduct is taken very seriously. Misconduct can be a career-ending disaster.

MRS Bulletin, Feb 2002MRS Bulletin, Feb 2002

From Comstock ppt: “What is Ethics?”

From Comstock ppt: “What is Ethics?”

Goodwin Case

Question:

Why would a smart person do something so stupid?

“What is ‘Responsible Research?”

“What are the Standards of Research Ethics, Where do they Come From, and Why Should Anyone Comply with them?”

The standards of research ethics are rules and principles of conduct that apply to scientists engaged in the practice of research. They include conventional standards, professional codes, legal rules, and requirements of morality.

Standards of Scientific Misconduct

Charles Babbage, 1830 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England:

Trimming: Removing data that fails to conform to one's hypothesis.

Cooking: Making many measurements and only reporting those deemed satisfactory.

Forging: Recording fictitious results.

Standards of Scientific Misconduct

"FFP" Standard: "Scientific misconduct means fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research. It does not include honest error or honest differences in interpretation or judgments of data."

Standards of Scientific Misconduct MIM:

Misappropriation, Interference, and Misrepresentation

"Research misconduct means significant misbehavior that improperly appropriates the intellectual property or contributions of others, that intentionally impedes the progress of research, or that risks corrupting the scientific record or compromising the integrity of scientific practices. Such behaviors are unethical and unacceptable in proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or in reviewing proposals or research reports of others." Ryan Report, 1995

What’s Missing?

FFP and MIM each capture some important categories of scientific misconduct. But they are inappropriately focused only on issues of intellectual property and the protection of the integrity of research itself.

There are other aspects of scientific practice that should be subject to standards of proper conduct…

Categories of Scientific Misconduct:

1.0 Truth Telling1.1 In research (Ex: Accurate reporting of research results)1.2 In self-representation (Ex: Resume’s and Credentials)

2.0 Prohibition on Intellectual Theft: 2.1 Plagiarism2.2 Citation Ethics 2.3 Authorship Credit

3.0 Conflicts of Interest: Funding Sources, bias3.1Concealment of Relevant Data3.2 Requests for Misrepresentation 3.3 Funding-Source Interests Entering the Research

Process4.0 Treatment of Research Subjects

4.1 Informed Consent and Human Subjects4.2 Humane and Appropriate Treatment of Animal Subjects

5.0 Conflicts between scientific aims and other ethically relevant aims.

5.1 Imposition of social or environmental risks 5.2 Sexism or Racism in the sciences 5.2 Student/Mentor relations

6.0 ???

Upshot:

In the context of scientific research, it is important to understand the principles that govern the proper conduct of research.

You should critically and reflectively consider the basis for these principles, and the reasons behind them.

When people fail to abide by them, the consequences are drastic and often disproportional.

How could Smart People do something so Stupid?

Ethical choices often arise in the process of scientific research.

When people are not ready, if these issues catch them by surprise, they sometimes make terrible mistakes. (Even intelligent and well-meaning people!)

Ethics and the Responsible Conduct of Research

One aim of this session is to prepare you for choices that you will surely face in the course of your career as a student, researcher, scientist, or engineer.

Ethics and the Responsible Conduct of Research

Example: Plagiarism and Authorship.

When, and in what form, is it permissible to use the work of others in one’s own research?

*Plagiarism Hand-Out*Bloggs Hand-Out

Bloggs Case #1

Bloggs Case #1

“Utilitarianism”: The ethical thing to do is whatever will maximize aggregate benefit for everyone.

“The Greatest Good for the

Greatest Number” (GHGN)

Bloggs Case #2

Rights:

Would slicing and dicing Bloggs violate his rights? (What are rights?)

Rights?

Response: Slicing and dicing Bloggs would violate his rights.

A moral right is a justified claim that an individual (or group) may make to certain objects or certain treatment by others.

Bloggs’s right to X may take the form of:

A claim that Bloggs may make to a particular object (e.g., his kidneys)

A constraint on how Bloggs should be treated (e.g., he shouldn’t be killed for his organs)

An obligation on others not to interfere with Bloggs’s doing X (e.g., his continuing to live)

Ethical Theory

Immanuel Kant: Categorical Imperative:

“Act only such that you could will the maxim on which you act as a universal law.”

“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, always as an end in itself, and never as a means only.”

Would ‘slicing and dicing’ Bloggs for his organs involve treating him as a mere means?

Ethical Theory:

Killing v. Letting Die: It has sometimes been argued that we have a moral duty not to kill, but no moral duty (or a lighter moral duty) not to let people die.

Does this distinction explain why we shouldn’t kill Bloggs for his organs?

Bloggs Case #3

Bloggs Case #3

The ethics of acts vs. omissions

The greater good vs. “clean hands”

Ethical Theory:

We reveal our ethical views when we explain or justify our choices and behavior to others.

Ethical views can be thoughtless and unreflective, or thoughtful and reflective. To the extent that we’re thoughtless and unreflective, our value system will lack integrity and depth.

If our values are shallow and incoherent, we will make bad decisions, …and we will be shallow and incoherent. (?)

Ethics in Science

No one (?) pursues a career in science planning or expecting to perpetrate scientific misconduct.

By considering the motives and pressures that lead people to perpetrate misconduct, we can prepare ourselves in advance to make good decisions.

Hard Cases

Fraud and misconduct are in one sense easy cases: people know they’re doing the wrong thing when they fake the data.

Are there ethically problematic cases at the margin where people can fall into misconduct without realizing that this is what they’ve done?

A Story: The Baltimore Case

April 1986: Publication by David Baltimore, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, et al. of a paper titled:

"Altered Repertoire of Endogenous Immunoglobulin Gene Expression in Transgenic Mice Containing a Rearranged Mu Heavy Chain Gene"

The article appeared in the journal Cell.

The Baltimore Case

May 1986: Margot O'Toole, Imanishi-Kari's postdoctoral assistant at MIT, found that she could not duplicate Imanishi-Kari's data.

O’Toole wasted(?) a year demonstrating that important experiments in the paper were wrong.

The Baltimore Case

Frustrated, in May 1986 O’Toole decided to “blow the whistle.” She took the facts to her thesis adviser. She also contacted two scientists at Tufts University, which was about to hire Imanishi-Kari.

COMMENT: What should you do if you suspect misconduct on the part of someone in your lab? It is important to insure that the rights of those you suspect are protected, even if you know them to be guilty of misconduct.“Due Process” rights.

The Baltimore Case

The hiring committee at Tufts was concerned enough to ask Imanishi-Kari for proof of the work she'd done.

On perusal of her notes they did not decide to act on O'Toole's concerns. Tufts hired Imanishi-Kari.

(US Secret Service later said that these notes were “fabricated” just before the meeting.)

The Baltimore Case

June 1986: O'Toole confronted Imanishi-Kari.

According to O'Toole, Imanishi-Kari admitted that some of the work cited in the paper was not done, and other work got different results than what was reported.

The Baltimore CaseO'Toole asked that the paper be withdrawn.

David Baltimore replied that such problems with accuracy are not unusual and need not be corrected.

“A startling new standard for scientific inquiry?” --Elliot & Stern, p. 46.

The Baltimore Case

September 1986: Dean at MIT assigned Herman Eisen to look at the case. Eisen noted that there were errors in the Cell paper but that this was "the stuff of science" and not misconduct.

(E&S p. 46)

The Baltimore Case

Eisen received a letter from David Baltimore:

"The evidence that the Bet-1 antibody doesn't do as described in the paper is clear. Thereza [Imanishi-Kari]'s statement to you that she knew it all the time is a remarkable admission of guilt... Why Thereza chose to use this data and to mislead both of us and those who read the paper is beyond me.”

The Baltimore Case “All authors do have to take responsibility

for a manuscript, so all of us are in some sense culpable, but I would hate to see David [Weaver]'s integrity questioned for something he accepted in good faith... The literature is full of bits and pieces now known to be wrong, but it is not the tradition to point each one out publicly."

He went on to say that no correction should be published but that he would privately let others know that Imanishi-Kari's data "are not reliable, and I for one, will be skeptical of Thereza's work in the future.“ (E&S p. 47.)

The Baltimore Case

Questionable standards represented in Baltimore’s letter to Eisen?

(Attitudes concerning misconduct were different at the time when Baltimore wrote this letter. Does this mitigate the fault he might incur from involvement in a cover-up?)

The Baltimore Case

July 1986: Walter Stewart and Ned Feder at NIH started examining the case, and spoke to John Dingle, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. [There is no one whose job it is to investigate possible cases of scientific fraud.]

NIH appointed a special committee to investigate the matter.

The Baltimore Case

Summer 1986: Baltimore took steps to mobilize the scientific community to defend Imanishi-Kari against the NIH investigation. He mobilized colleagues to write op-ed pieces and to join the fray. A large group of distinguished scientists went to Washington on his behalf.

Baltimore "cast the conflict as one of outsiders invading the sanctuary of science.“--E&S, p. 48

The Baltimore CaseOctober 1994: NIH Office of Research

Integrity (ORI) ruled that Imanishi-Kari falsified data and should be barred from receiving NIH grants or contracts for a 10 year period.

Secret Service experts provide evidence that notebooks provided by Imanishi-Kari's as evidence of her innocence were, some of them, prepared shortly before being given to the ORI.

The Baltimore CaseThere is evidence that:

Imanishi-Kari threw out data that did not conform to her hypothesis

that the dates on the lab notebooks were wrong: they have Imanishi-Kari using equipment that was not yet in the lab, and have dates that do not conform to the radiation counter tapes fixed to her lab books.

Secret Service found that 20 percent of Imanishi-Kari's material showed evidence of being faked.

The Baltimore Case

1994-1996: Imanishi-Kari pursued the appeals process, continuing to argue that she was sloppy and wrong, not dishonest and deliberately deceptive.

The Baltimore Case

June 1996: Department of Health and Human Services review panel ruled that Imanishi-Kari is not guilty of the misconduct allegations.

The Baltimore Case

Where are they now?

Imanishi Kari: Still at Tufts. O’Toole: Science writerBaltimore: President of Cal Tech

Another Recent Case:

Whang Woo-Suk:

South Korean scientist who quickly became very famous for brilliant work on stem cell and cloning research.

First cloned dog “Snuppy.”

Another Recent Case:

Whang Woo-Suk:

First questions were raised about the origin of research materials, which were found to have been donated by people within Whang’s lab. This violated international regulatory guidelines for such research.

Another Recent Case:

Whang Woo-Suk:

Then questions arose about the research itself.

Under pressure, Whang admitted that substantial portions of his most celebrated research were faked.

Why would Anyone Commit Scientific Fraud?

Reputation?

Publication and promotion?

To Get a Job or a Grant?

"There are undoubtedly many reasons why people choose to become scientists. Simple greed, however, is not high on the list."

-David Goodstein, "Inside Science," American Scholar, Autumn 1999.

www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/science_art.html

Risk Factors for Misconduct: David Goodstein

1. Ambition and career pressure. 2. Researchers know, or think that they know

what the answer would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly.

3. Work is being done in a field where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible.

SOURCE: David Goodstein, “Scientific Misconduct” ACADEME 2002.www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2002/02jfgoo.htm

Career PressureCareer Pressure: does not uniquely

identify a group as more prone to misconduct: All scientists are under career pressure.

Knowing the Answer (Or thinking you do…)

Knowing the Answer: Those who commit scientific fraud are rarely people who self-consciously intend to falsify the scientific record.

Reproducibility of Experiments

“Experiments are seldom repeated by others. When a wrong result is found out, it is almost always because new work based on the wrong result doesn't proceed as expected. The belief that someone may repeat one's experiments is a strong disincentive for fraud, but this disincentive seems to be less effective in the biosciences where different research results may often be explained by differences in experimental circumstances, and especially where live organisms are used as research subjects. Variability among individual organisms might provide some apparent cover for a biologist tempted to cheat.”

-Goodstein, “Scientific Misconduct.”

Clark WolfDirector of BioethicsIowa State Universityjwcwolf@iastate.edu

Science, Ethics, and Graduate Study

Common Issues and Concerns for Graduate Students: Mentor/Student interaction Credit where credit is due Ownership of data Plagiarism and Responsibility

Case 1: Data from a Graduate Course—Social

ScienceYou are a graduate student taking a course with Professor Teacher. In this course, Prof. Teacher gives the class some data from his/her ongoing research as illustrations. You are told to use some of this data in your course assignments. In doing so, you notice that the trends in this data have some interesting implications for other research you did with Professor Study and are now writing up. You want to use some of Prof. Teacher’s data in your article to draw out these new implications.

Whom, if anyone, do you approach about this, how do you approach him or her, and what do you say?

Case: Data from a Graduate Course—Social ScienceSource: http://onlineethics.org/reseth/mod/profdata.htmlBased on an idea by Gary Deimling.

Case 2: Changing the Procedure

by Caroline Whitbeck, Ph.D.based on an idea of Arun Patel & Ravi Patil, MIT '93

You area member of a group of graduate students working on a large project. The results from your group's experiment are used for other experiment in the project. Your faculty supervisor, the principal investigator (PI) for the project, wants you to use a new procedure for your experimental work. The PI expects that the new procedure will yield results that are better suited to the experimental conditions of the other experimental work. The other students in your group do not wish to change the procedure. It will require more work and they think both that the PI will be impatient with the resulting delay, and that she will not notice if the old procedure is used.

You rely on the group for assistance for your own thesis work, so you want to deal tactfully with them, but you believe that if you use the old procedure, the quality of the data will suffer and you will mislead the PI and perhaps the entire scientific community.

You argue for using the new procedure and explaining to the PI that it will just take longer, but the rest of the group is not persuaded.

What do you do and how do you go about it?

Case 3: Whose Data Is It? Maie ElKassaby was a PhD student in the lab of Dr. Jeffrey Williams, a microbiologist at Michigan State University. ElKassaby was working on a project supported by Williams NIH grant, in collaboration with scientists at UpJohn Co. and physicians in the Sudan. Following a series of disagreements, Williams withdrew his support as ElKassaby's PhD advisor. ElKassaby filed a grievance against Williams and removed the tissue samples and data she had accumulated on the project.

Although an inquiry found the grievance against Williams to be groundless, ElKassaby continued to refuse to return the lab data to Williams. Associate dean Justin McCormick pointed out that the university has an obligation to protect student interests as well as faculty prerogatives. He described the situation as a divorce in which the parties are seeking fair distribution of joint property. Under the guidance of MSU officials, ElKassaby was provided with three faculty advisors who helped her write up her sequestered data for publication, in spite of protests from Williams and the UpJohn collaborators.

Jeffrey Williams, Sr professor of Microbiology v. Maie ElKassaby, Michigan State U. 1989.

Case 3: Whose Data Is It? Williams was (wrongly) advised by Alan Price that "sequestering data is not misconduct," it's an internal affair, "but if the data are published, that is plagiarism." Looking at standard definitions of "scientific misconduct," Price may have been correct. (This in itself provides good reason for revisions like those adopted by the Ryan Comission!) The paper was eventually published with ElKassaby as sole author, at which point Williams filed charges of scientific misconduct against ElKassaby and the MSU administrator and faculty involved in the preparation of the article.

Both MSU and NIH began independent investigations of Williams' allegations. The NIH panel in the end censored ElKassaby for her refusal to "permit access by collaborators and the PI to primary research materials and data," citing the refusal as a "breach of accepted scientific practice" and "therefore an act of scientific misconduct."

(from Elliot, Deni, and Sterns, Judy E. 1997. Research Ethics: A Reader, Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics, Pub. p. 211)

Case 3: Whose Data Is It?

Both MSU and NIH began independent investigations of Williams' allegations. The NIH panel in the end censored ElKassaby for her refusal to "permit access by collaborators and the PI to primary research materials and data," citing the refusal as a "breach of accepted scientific practice" and "therefore an act of scientific misconduct."

(Elliot Deni, and Sterns, Judy E. 1997. Research Ethics: A Reader, Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics, Pub. p. 211)