Misconduct in Science

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00:00:11.23 I appreciate this opportunity to talk about misconduct in science
00:00:16.02 but I'm sure many of you are wondering why I'm even bothering to talk about it.
00:00:19.21 Misconduct in science used to be the province strictly of the scientific community.
00:00:24.29 Some scientists behave unethically,
00:00:26.23 others would be highly critical of them, and the debate would go on,
00:00:30.14 there would be opprobrium for those who presumably were violating ethical standards,
00:00:36.00 but unfortunately, as time has gone on,
00:00:38.15 the government has become involved,
00:00:40.02 and when the government became involved,
00:00:41.14 the scientific problem, of misconduct in science,
00:00:45.08 became much more complicated.
00:00:46.19 And this outline of my talk is shown here,
00:00:49.10 why government became involved, an inadequate response, this will deal with some scientists,
00:00:54.22 years of debate, which went on for a long time,
00:00:57.19 misperceptions of science and scientists, which have confused the debate enormously,
00:01:02.15 there was a battle between the scientists on the one hand
00:01:04.18 and the lawyers on the other
00:01:05.25 because they didn't, the lawyers didn't understand what science is all about,
00:01:09.12 and finally, the outcome, a definition and a mandated course on responsible conduct of research,
00:01:15.03 which is now called RCR.
00:01:16.18 It all began with hearings before the United States Congress,
00:01:20.24 at that time, the science and technology committee was, had on its
00:01:26.22 a young congressman by the name of Al Gore.
00:01:28.24 This is the early 1980's, and there were scandals
00:01:32.12 at Harvard and at Yale of absolutely unbelievable behavior
00:01:36.20 on the part of leading scientist at those two universities.
00:01:39.25 And Gore then conducted a bunch of hearings.
00:01:42.05 And he was flabbergasted at the hearings because he heard about stories,
00:01:45.24 for example, scientific papers that were written when the experiments were never performed.
00:01:50.01 So, there were a whole series of testimonies
00:01:52.14 and subsequent years, there were testimonies before other committees
00:01:55.02 besides that one, which Gore was on.
00:01:58.00 So, one of the people who testified before Gore
00:02:01.02 was in fact the president of the National Academy of Sciences
00:02:04.02 and this is from his testimony, a summary of his testimony.
00:02:07.23 He was then president of the National Academy.
00:02:09.24 He indicated that it, quote, "gave him little pleasure and satisfaction to testify
00:02:16.14 on the subject of scientific fraud. The problem has been greatly exaggerated
00:02:21.28 in the press and when there is fraudulent science,"
00:02:26.25 and I'm quoting, "it occurs in a system that operates in an effective democratic and self-correcting mode."
00:02:33.18 This viewpoint was echoed by Donald Frederickson,
00:02:36.21 who at that time was the director of NIH.
00:02:38.21 Well, you can just imagine the reaction of the congressmen.
00:02:42.13 For example, Gore's comment was,
00:02:44.28 "I cannot avoid the conclusion that one reason for the persistence of this type of problem
00:02:50.02 is the reluctance of people high in the science field
00:02:53.19 to take these matters very seriously."
00:02:56.01 And they should have admitted, there was fraud in science.
00:03:00.11 There's, it's been exaggerated,
00:03:02.12 to be sure, and there's very little of it compared to the amount of science being done
00:03:07.06 but even that is way too much and we need to do something to correct it
00:03:11.08 instead of taking the position that science is self correcting.
00:03:14.10 Science is only self-correcting when the work is very important.
00:03:18.11 Lots of trivial work is published and it never gets corrected
00:03:21.19 because it's of relatively small significance.
00:03:23.24 So, the battle went on for quite awhile.
00:03:26.14 And immediately the press picked this up.
00:03:29.07 And here's an article from the Chicago tribune,
00:03:31.06 a little later in the 1980's by John Crewdson
00:03:34.20 who was a Pulitzer Prize winner,
00:03:36.13 called "Cheating in the Lab: Under pressure, some researchers break the law."
00:03:41.06 That article is disgraceful. It has more mistakes in it than much of the science that he was criticizing.
00:03:46.08 And those mistakes have never been remedied in subsequent publications.
00:03:51.01 Breaking the law does not appear very much in that particular article.
00:03:54.18 And then the headlines, look at the headlines.
00:03:58.11 "Scientists Under Fire",
00:03:59.25 "Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud."
00:04:04.06 "Squalor in Science."
00:04:06.09 "Cancer Study was Made Up."
00:04:08.01 "Are Researchers Trustworthy?"
00:04:09.28 "Investigators Investigated." "Fraud in Science: How Much, How Serious?"
00:04:14.29 "The Science Mob- Fraud, Complacency and Secrecy."
00:04:19.06 And then the last two I love. "Publish or Perish- or Fake It."
00:04:23.21 And "Did we rear a bunch of moral mutants?"
00:04:27.25 So, this is the way the press reacted and finally, books began to appear.
00:04:33.07 So, here's one, written by William Broad and Nicholas Wade.
00:04:36.16 Broad and Wade at the time they wrote that book were both correspondents
00:04:39.29 for Science, the journal Science.
00:04:42.13 They both now are prominent reporters for the New York Times.
00:04:46.22 The title of their book is "Betrayers of the Truth",
00:04:49.13 as if they know what truth is.
00:04:51.15 "Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science."
00:04:54.16 And this is where I move into the idea of misperceptions,
00:04:57.26 because the book is full of misperceptions.
00:05:00.02 Here is the preface.
00:05:01.29 And I called it erroneous perceptions of science and scientists.
00:05:06.18 They wrote "According to the conventional wisdom,
00:05:09.27 science is a strictly logical process,
00:05:12.22 objectivity is the essence of the scientist's attitude to his work,
00:05:17.18 and scientific claims are rigorously checked by peer scrutiny and the replication of experiments.
00:05:24.26 From this self-verifying system, error of all sorts is speedily and inexorably cast out."
00:05:31.23 That's nonsense.
00:05:33.08 It's full of incorrect statements.
00:05:35.16 For example, much of science is not a logical process.
00:05:39.00 The Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2011 was given to a scientist
00:05:43.19 who made a chance discovery, followed it up by his intuition,
00:05:47.07 his instincts, nothing logical about it,
00:05:49.15 he just didn't bow to the criticism of experts who said it was sheer, unadulterated nonsense,
00:05:55.10 and the work proved to be correct.
00:05:57.04 So, that's an indication that logic is not necessary ingredient of science.
00:06:02.25 Chance, opportunity comes along.
00:06:05.25 Scientific claims are checked by peer scrutiny.
00:06:08.25 They're not always checked,
00:06:10.05 and they certainly are not eliminated by self-verifying system and speedily, inexorably cast out.
00:06:18.20 So, Broad and Wade have in fact distorted the culture
00:06:22.19 of science and the nature of scientists themselves.
00:06:26.00 Scientists, many of them, are subjective, biased individuals,
00:06:31.28 and it's only through the collective activity
00:06:34.06 of scientists as a whole, the community of scientists,
00:06:37.10 that we get objectivity, but we don't get objectivity from individual people, necessarily.
00:06:42.17 So, let me go on now.
00:06:44.18 Since I talked about truth, here is a statement that I came across very early
00:06:48.16 in this discussion.
00:06:50.05 "Truth in science depends on the researcher's unbiased application
00:06:54.13 of proven investigative techniques to appropriate experiments."
00:06:58.23 Again, a statement that's riddled with misperceptions.
00:07:03.24 What is truth? Will it be the same tomorrow as today?
00:07:07.14 How do we know?
00:07:09.03 Who decides? Who is unbiased?
00:07:11.23 How do we recognize appropriate experiments
00:07:14.08 and who determines what technique is correct?
00:07:16.18 Who knows what is proven?
00:07:19.05 As years go by, we keep changing our mind
00:07:21.08 about science, and that's the nature of the culture of science.
00:07:24.18 So, this misperception has led Congress down the wrong path
00:07:29.13 because they began to develop procedures which dealt with fraud.
00:07:34.04 And they were talking about the work fraud,
00:07:35.16 which I'll come back to in a little while.
00:07:37.29 So, what was the Washington solution?
00:07:40.14 The Congress was having its meetings, so they first convened committees.
00:07:43.28 Then, there were commissions created, because the committees were inadequate.
00:07:47.04 The committees came in with, the commissions came in with reports,
00:07:50.08 then they had to set up review committees, so there were reviews.
00:07:52.23 Out of that came the Office of Scientific Integrity.
00:07:55.14 I left out another office, what I'll call the Office of Scientific Integrity Review.
00:08:00.04 But finally they came to the Office of Research Integrity,
00:08:02.19 which we have today. That office then hires staff,
00:08:06.20 they have a big budget, they call meetings.
00:08:08.22 They develop policies, regulations resulted, they required courses,
00:08:12.29 and now we have a shopping list of topics.
00:08:15.10 So, this is how responsible conduct in research arose on the university campuses
00:08:20.06 and students had the dubious pleasure, of those who were supported by NIH or NSF,
00:08:24.28 had the dubious pleasure of taking such courses.
00:08:28.29 So, now we go on to ask a very fundamental question.
00:08:33.04 Up until now, the language had been fraud.
00:08:35.18 And I posed the question, why was fraud replaced by misconduct
00:08:39.09 and what is misconduct in research?
00:08:41.12 Two questions. I should point out that the scientific community was unified
00:08:46.03 in being opposed to fraud.
00:08:47.18 We thought we knew what fraud was
00:08:49.13 and we were very happy to say fraud is intolerable,
00:08:52.17 NIH and NSF both should impose sanctions on scientists who are guilty of committing fraud,
00:08:58.05 but all of a sudden the word fraud disappeared,
00:09:01.04 and we wound up with the word misconduct
00:09:02.28 and we begin to ask why, and then the scientific community became very excercised.
00:09:07.22 So, the answer to why, it shows up on this slide.
00:09:12.16 Here's an article, again from the late 1980's,
00:09:15.19 in Time magazine, called "Science Under Siege."
00:09:18.08 And you see the scientist sitting there on the stage of the microscope
00:09:21.12 and the words "tight money, blunders and scandal plague America's researchers."
00:09:26.05 But interestingly enough, at the top of this cover of Time magazine,
00:09:29.22 is the question "Do we have too many lawyers?"
00:09:32.22 My friends think I put that in there with Photoshop,
00:09:35.18 but the truth of the matter is, it was a separate article in the journal,
00:09:39.23 but it turns out to be very useful for my present purposes.
00:09:42.27 Why did I bring up the idea of lawyers?
00:09:45.14 Lawyers didn't like the word fraud.
00:09:48.21 Fraud in American jurisprudence
00:09:51.01 requires enormous burden on the lawyers who are trying to prove fraud.
00:09:54.29 For example, you have to show that there's a false representation,
00:09:58.23 the defendant knew it was false,
00:10:01.13 there was intention to deceive and induce reliance,
00:10:04.10 and then the final point, which is much more difficult for a lawyer to prove about a science paper,
00:10:09.15 there was justifiable and actual reliance on the misrepresentation
00:10:14.15 and actual damage.
00:10:16.05 So, many of the papers that would be considered fraudulent
00:10:19.06 in the scientific literature don't do much damage except to the individual who wrote the terrible paper
00:10:24.10 but they don't do damage to the community,
00:10:26.08 so the lawyers did not want to have the burden of pursuing a case on the basis of fraud,
00:10:31.24 and they therefore came up with this wonderful phrase, misconduct.
00:10:35.11 And that's when I got very, very alarmed.
00:10:37.19 Working scientists were terribly concerned about the idea of switching from fraud to misconduct in science
00:10:43.22 or misconduct in research.
00:10:44.28 We wanted a very tight, rigorous definition, not something open ended,
00:10:49.17 which defied interpretation.
00:10:51.08 To us, misconduct was very simple.
00:10:53.12 It involved fabrication, making up data or results,
00:10:57.25 falsification, changing data or results, and plagiarism, using as one's own
00:11:04.02 the ideas or words of someone else.
00:11:06.11 So, the three areas where scientific community was almost unanimous
00:11:11.10 in terms of judging something to be misconduct
00:11:13.26 for which sanctions would be appropriate.
00:11:16.21 But the lawyers were not happy with that limited definition,
00:11:19.20 they preferred something much more open ended, as shown here.
00:11:23.05 So, in addition to having the words fabrication, falsification and plagiarism,
00:11:27.26 they wrote, and other practices that seriously deviate
00:11:32.03 from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community
00:11:35.28 for proposing, conducting or recording research.
00:11:38.18 What does that mean?
00:11:40.14 Misrepresentation, deception, selection of data,
00:11:44.27 inadequate referencing, malfeasance, misfeasance, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:49.03 They love vagueness and an open-ended law.
00:11:52.17 And that's why there was a battle between the scientists on the one hand,
00:11:56.02 and the lawyers on the other.
00:11:57.07 I recall vividly being in a meeting
00:12:00.00 at NIH at the initiation of James Weingarten, who was then director of NIH,
00:12:04.09 to discuss this battle over fraud versus misconduct.
00:12:07.10 And in the room were the two of us representing science,
00:12:10.22 and about 20 lawyers. Many of them, about 6 or 8, were from various government agencies,
00:12:17.02 and the other 12 or so were from universities, chief councils of Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
00:12:22.06 California, et cetera, Stanford.
00:12:24.04 And we had terrific battles over this particular issue.
00:12:28.18 Should we say, FFP, fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism,
00:12:33.17 or should we have something much more open ended,
00:12:36.09 such as the other practices that seriously deviate.
00:12:39.04 And at the end of the day, we wound up very happy
00:12:42.06 because the decision was made that we would have only the three categories
00:12:47.05 as misconduct in science.
00:12:48.25 And I left very content, only the next day to receive a phone call
00:12:52.07 from Weingarten that the problem which had been resolved on the NIH campus
00:12:56.08 with government participation had moved downtown
00:12:58.25 to what is, as they say, "downtown" means the Department of Public Health.
00:13:03.01 And that's where they had lawyers and no scientists
00:13:05.18 and they put back this clause, "and other practices which seriously deviate."
00:13:09.28 So, the battle for removing the seriously deviate clause
00:13:12.27 went on for a long time.
00:13:14.22 Fortunately, we got a break, and here's the break.
00:13:17.09 There was a case involving a worker
00:13:19.26 on an NSF grant and it was charged with misconduct in science.
00:13:24.19 And here's the language. And the office OIG stands for the office of the inspector general.
00:13:29.17 "OIG determined that the researcher had been involved
00:13:33.10 in 16 incidents of sexual misfeasance
00:13:36.13 with female graduate and undergraduate students at the research site,
00:13:40.28 on the way to the site; in his home, car and office.
00:13:45.20 Many of these incidents were classified as sexual assaults.
00:13:49.25 OIG further determined that these incidents were an integral part
00:13:54.22 of this individual's performance as a researcher and research mentor
00:13:59.03 and represented a serious deviation from accepted research practices."
00:14:04.02 Therefore, according to NSF and the definition at the time,
00:14:09.02 they amounted it to research misconduct under NSF regulations.
00:14:14.19 As you can well imagine, this created a major storm.
00:14:18.03 I went around the country showing this in lots of places,
00:14:21.19 I put it into an article published in Science, and it had the reaction that you would expect.
00:14:26.28 That it was preposterous. You can't have a definition,
00:14:29.02 incidentally, I read many of the affidavits of these 16 incidents,
00:14:33.00 these were sexual abuses, they should have been prosecuted by state law,
00:14:36.28 and there was no question about it,
00:14:39.11 So, as a consequence of this,
00:14:41.18 we finally reached a stage where we got rid of that language,
00:14:47.00 we wound up with FFP, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism.
00:14:50.27 I remember it easily because, I use, FFP stands for frequent flier program.
00:14:55.15 I was flying back and forth across the country a great deal.
00:14:58.04 So, we wind up with a course.
00:14:59.22 This gives you an indication of the extent of the course,
00:15:02.11 and I'll just go through this very briefly.
00:15:05.27 It starts at the top- this is my course, for example.
00:15:08.21 Research misconduct, and I deal with specific cases of fabrication,
00:15:12.28 falsification and plagiarism.
00:15:14.10 Then we address the issue of whistleblowers.
00:15:17.05 When you have suspected misconduct, or errors even,
00:15:21.01 whistleblowers come in and we discuss the role and plight,
00:15:25.09 because they suffer enormously on frequent occasions.
00:15:29.00 And finally, we get to publication practices,
00:15:31.26 authorship, citing previous work, access to data,
00:15:34.14 sharing of data, retention and ownership of data and collaborative research.
00:15:39.06 Authorship practices don't belong in the province of the United States government,
00:15:43.06 they are problems which have to be solved in a collegial fashion.
00:15:46.05 And they're very difficult at times, and there will be contentious points of view
00:15:49.22 about this, but in any case, they are not what I call "research misconduct"
00:15:53.22 and are not governed by the Office of Research Integrity.
00:15:57.05 And then I get to peer review, scientific papers, grant applications,
00:16:00.14 confidentiality, and mentor-mentee relationships.
00:16:04.03 And then in big print at the very bottom,
00:16:06.10 is "Conflict of Interest and Commitment".
00:16:09.03 Interestingly enough, that, to me, is the most important area of misconduct
00:16:15.01 and it's one that the Office of Research Integrity never deals with.
00:16:18.23 So, as in most fields of endeavor, there are different points of view
00:16:22.12 as to how to deal with the problem.
00:16:23.20 For example, there are people who think that you can stamp down fraud.
00:16:27.23 Here's an article, a very recent article, from earlier this month,
00:16:30.29 "The time is right to confront misconduct."
00:16:33.21 "Current scientific leaders have the opportunity to take the initiative and stamp down fraud."
00:16:39.23 And I maintain you can't stamp down fraud,
00:16:42.17 I maintain that the people in ORI who are talking about preventing fraud
00:16:47.01 are kidding themselves. Fraud is something that occurs for people who usually sociopaths.
00:16:53.02 You can't stop Wakefield in London,
00:16:55.03 you can't stop Ninov in the Berkeley Lawrence Laboratory
00:16:58.04 from discovering an element that he didn't discover
00:17:00.20 or SchÃ¶n in Bell Labs for discovering all sorts of wonderful things that were not real.
00:17:05.12 These things go on and we can't stop them
00:17:08.22 and all you have to deal with is impose sanctions when the evidence is clear
00:17:12.25 and then try and straighten out the scientific literature.
00:17:14.29 So, for example, in trying to stamp down fraud,
00:17:17.24 you come across this wonderful quote,
00:17:19.23 which I got from a professor of criminal law
00:17:22.27 at Columbia University.
00:17:24.17 He says you can learn from criminal law experience.
00:17:27.16 "The issue is not whether we should countenance science fraud.
00:17:30.22 Of course we should not anymore than we should countenance burglary.
00:17:35.08 But a criminal law perspective teaches that it is not worth the resources-
00:17:40.17 both economic and ideological-
00:17:42.28 to try to prevent all burglaries.
00:17:45.15 The issue is how many burglaries are tolerable given the alternatives.
00:17:50.14 By contrast, leading scientists discussing science fraud at times
00:17:55.00 sound as though collective guilt is justly imposed every time someone is caught stealing."
00:18:01.20 And that's the fundamental problem.
00:18:03.18 So, he supports the view that you can't eliminate fraud.
00:18:07.02 But, what you could do is something about this second problem.
00:18:10.05 For example, here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education
00:18:14.28 of just a few days ago.
00:18:16.24 It's called "Academic Researchers Escape Scrutiny in Glaxo Fraud Settlement."
00:18:21.13 Now, GlaxoSmithKline just settled a $3 billion lawsuit with the United States government
00:18:28.02 over fraud over their drug Paxil.
00:18:31.03 But the settlement involved not only the company,
00:18:34.15 but it involved the statement that articles which were published by 22 professors
00:18:38.21 at universities, written by a company that was hired by Glaxo,
00:18:43.04 were involved in this fraud as well.
00:18:46.12 It reads as follows:
00:18:47.10 "federal prosecutors triumphantly announced
00:18:49.23 the nation's largest ever healthcare fraud settlement last month,
00:18:53.11 when the pharmaceutical maker GlaxoSmithKline
00:18:56.26 admitted marketing its drug for unapproved purposes.
00:19:00.15 Virtually unpublicized was a key detail:
00:19:04.03 one of the central pieces of evidence in the case was a 2001 scientific article
00:19:10.11 listing 22 authors, most of them university professors, researchers,
00:19:15.23 that the article was actually written by Glaxo-hired authors
00:19:19.26 to overstate the benefits and understate the risks of a highly profitable Glaxo drug.
00:19:27.14 And when the settlement came out, they called the article as being part of the fraud
00:19:32.16 perpetrated by the company.
00:19:33.26 But nothing was done about the professors.
00:19:36.02 In one case I know of, a university professor writing a note,
00:19:41.04 an allegation of one of his colleagues at that university,
00:19:43.22 the president says, nothing can be done about it,
00:19:45.24 and nothing has been done about these 22 who are very prominent individuals.
00:19:50.00 So, I close with asking, are we getting anywhere on teaching these courses?
00:19:54.00 And I think you want to continue teaching, I enjoy the participation in the class,
00:19:59.21 and I try and turn the students on about the problem.
00:20:01.22 And I might point out that scientists are human beings
00:20:06.02 and there's a wonderful commentary on science
00:20:08.07 which comes from a New York Times article of 1885.
00:20:11.27 Times have really not changed.
00:20:13.13 It reads as follows:
00:20:14.25 "Like other men," please pardon them for being sexist,
00:20:19.01 because women weren't doing much in science in 1885,
00:20:22.05 So, "like other men (and women) they are self-seeking, ambitious,
00:20:26.12 and have their personal ends to gain.
00:20:29.09 Can we assume that morally they are any better than their neighbors;
00:20:33.04 or that if they get possession of place and power,
00:20:37.28 they will not use and pervert them to the promotion of their selfish objects?
00:20:43.11 It is to be hoped, please,
00:20:45.29 it is to be hoped, that in the futures,"
00:20:47.20 remember, this is 1885,
00:20:49.15 "science will become so developed as to react upon character
00:20:54.09 and give us men,"
00:20:55.00 and I'll add women,
00:20:55.27 "morally as well as intellectually superior; but we are far from any such happy result as yet."
00:21:01.27 So, we're still hoping.
00:21:03.05 And I will continue to teach, but I want to point out that it's difficult to know
00:21:10.14 whether one is being successful and having any influence
00:21:13.06 in the course, and I have a wonderful cartoon,
00:21:15.05 which was written by a man by the name of Ed Himelblau,
00:21:18.22 who was a student at the University of Wisconsin and then became a postdoc
00:21:22.04 and he wrote at the bottom, looking at the seminar board,
00:21:24.28 about all the seminar notices on ethics,
00:21:27.10 "I have to fake my data...with all these ethics seminars I don't have time to do experiments."
00:21:33.11 Thank you very much.

This Talk

Speaker: Howard Schachman

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: May 2012

Talk Overview

Dr. Schachman presents a historical perspective of the government’s involvement in issues of misconduct in science, starting with congressional hearings on fraudulent research. He describes misperceptions of the culture of science, the differing views of scientists and lawyers over the definition of misconduct in science, and the requirement for courses on Responsible Conduct of Research. While supporting the teaching of such courses and imposing sanctions for proven cases of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, he emphasizes that unethical behavior cannot be eliminated completely.

Speaker Bio

Howard Schachman

Dr. Schachman joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1948 and is still teaching there as Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He has a long history of involvement in public policy related to science. The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology honored him… Continue Reading