Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [32]
The conversations that led to this startling conclusion were held with fifty-one scientists who were roughly one-third to halfway up the career ladder: assistant professors and postdoctoral fellows at public and private ‘major research universities’. The interviewees’ statements make entertaining and enlightening reading. Here’s one:
Okay, you got the expected results three times on week one on the same preparation, and then you say, oh, great. And you go to publish it and the reviewer comes back and says, ‘I want a clearer picture,’ and you go and you redo it – guess what, you can’t replicate your own results … Do you go ahead and try to take that to a different journal … or do you stop the publication altogether because you can’t duplicate your own results? … Was it false? Well, no, it wasn’t false one week, but maybe I can’t replicate it myself … there are a lot of choices that are gray choices … They’re not really falsification.
And another:
[T]here was one real famous episode in our field [where] it was clear that some of the results had just been thrown out … [When they were] queried [the researchers] … said, ‘Well we have been doing this for 20 years, we know when we’ve got a spurious result …’
There is another compelling indication that such attitudes are endemic: you can’t erode them by education or policing. I have already mentioned that the proportion of ‘questionable data’ published in Nature Cell Biology remained unaffected by the introduction of a data-screening process. The introduction of ethics classes for researchers at the University of Texas had similarly negligible effects. In fact, in a bizarre twist, a 1996 study of the effect of ethics education found that students became more likely, not less, to commit certain types of misdemeanour.
Now to strike the final nail into the coffin of the idea that scientists abhor and avoid misconduct. It is a clear and established fact that even those convicted of the worst crimes can return to the fold.
In 2008, University of Pennsylvania researchers Barbara Redman and Jon F. Merz published a rather remarkable piece of work. They tracked down forty-three established, high-flying researchers who had been found guilty of major misdemeanours such as falsifying results. Through literature searches, telephone interviews and dogged detective work, Redman and Merz established that, just a few years after their conviction, many of those offenders were back at the coalface, collaborating with colleagues and publishing scientific papers.
Reading the paper, you get the impression that Redman and Merz are somewhat shocked by their findings. They report that ‘the picture of the consequences painted by our interviews, which shows both the hardship of punishment and the chance for redemption, is perhaps more positive than it should be.’
If they are shocked, it is only because they failed to realise that, to a large degree, scientists gloss over misconduct. Here is what Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, had to say about the problem:
Most cases are probably not publicized. They are simply not recognized, covered up altogether; or the guilty researcher is urged to retrain, move to another institution, or retire from research. I have spoken perhaps a dozen times on research misconduct in several countries and often to audiences where people come from many countries. I usually ask the members of these audiences how many know of a case of misconduct. (I consciously do not offer a definition.) Usually half to two-thirds of the audience put up their hands. I then ask whether those cases were fully investigated, people punished if necessary, lessons learnt, and the published record corrected. Hardly any hands