Researchers Admit to Lapses in Ethics

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June 9, 2005 latimes.com THE NATION

Researchers Admit to Lapses in Ethics

Fewer than 2% of 3,200 biomedical scientists surveyed acknowledge

serious breaches. One in three reports at least one questionable act.

By Piller, Times Staff Writer

One in three biomedical researchers has engaged in at least one

practice of questionable scientific integrity, according to a survey

published today in the journal Nature.

Only a small fraction of respondents — fewer than 2% — acknowledged

serious lapses: plagiarism, or falsification or fabrication of data.

Lesser transgressions, however, were relatively common in the survey,

which posed questions on 34 ethical issues.

Of about 3,200 scientists surveyed, 1.7% said they had used

confidential information without authorization, 6% had withheld data

that contradicted their findings, 12.5% had overlooked the use of

flawed data or analysis by others, and 15.5% had changed the design,

methodology or results of a study under pressure from a funding

source.

Many respondents also said they had inappropriately designated the

authorship of papers or had flawed record keeping.

" Integrity in the practice of science is more than just the absence

of fraud, " said C. son, a researcher at HealthPartners

Research Foundation in Minneapolis and lead author of the study.

son said the findings contradicted assumptions that ethical

lapses were aberrations within a generally sound research environment.

He suggested that intense competition to win grants and publish in

prestigious journals had a corrosive effect on research quality and

reliability.

" There is a lot of pressure on people, you might say, to compromise

at the margins, " said Price, associate vice chancellor for

research at UC Berkeley.

He said it was extraordinary that the survey turned up 10 admissions

of outright fraud.

The federal Office of Research Integrity, which monitors research for

the Department of Health and Human Services, has confirmed only about

160 cases of fraud since 1992.

But Price and other science administrators said such behavior hardly

reflected a crisis of scientific honesty.

The survey is " interesting and surprising, but I'm not sure it's

significant, " said Goodstein, vice provost at Caltech. " You

have to distinguish between really bad behavior, such as plagiarism

and fraud, and behavior that is questionable but not terribly bad. "

Goodstein and Price doubted some of the conclusions of the study,

saying that the complexity of ethical issues in the laboratory was

not easily boiled down to a simple survey.

For example, about 200 respondents said they had failed to present

data that contradicted their findings. But they may have just ignored

poorly developed or irrelevant information.

About 300 respondents said they had failed to give appropriate

credit, a lapse that could be tantamount to plagiarism. But their

answer could merely reflect second thoughts about the ordering of

multiple authors in a published paper — contentious among scientists

but rarely a significant ethical issue.

Yale University science historian J. Kevles said that without

looking at each scientist's behavior in detail, it would be hard to

know whether many genuine ethical lapses had occurred.

His book " The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and

Character " examined allegations of scientific fraud against Caltech

President Baltimore when he was president of Rockefeller

University. Baltimore was later exonerated.

" You have to exercise judgment. Scientists do that all the time, "

Kevles said. " There seems to be a kind of Puritanism that has entered

into scientific discussions about the presentation of data. "