June 24, 2008

A University's New Oath for Scientists: First, Do No Plagiarizing

After decades of quiet debate across the sciences, the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science has instituted a Hippocratic Oath for graduate students in the life sciences. New students first took the oath last fall, pledging (among other things) “never to allow financial gain, competitiveness, or ambition to cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship.”

In a letter in last week’s issue of the journal Science, Karen D. Davis, the graduate coordinator at Toronto’s institute, and three colleagues argue that such an oath should be a requirement for graduate programs in the life sciences, to help promote scientific ethics.

“There is the perception,” they write, “that current students take plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts, and scientific fraud less gravely than did previous generations of scientists.”

Toronto’s efforts come in the context of universities’ struggle to imbue their students with ethical norms. Some institutions are, like Toronto, requiring their students to take courses in scientific ethics.

In the new oath, students affirm their pride in belonging to the research community, their integrity in research conduct, and their pursuit of “knowledge for the greater good.” Unlike some of the pledges proposed over the years, Toronto’s does not mention abstaining from research on weapons or other projects viewed by some as socially or environmentally destructive. —Lila Guterman

Comments

1. Simply enforce the rules that already exist, and oaths like this will not be necessary.

   — Gustave    Jun 24, 12:52 PM    #

2. Imagine the need for such an oath. Or, if there is a clear need, why not require it of all graduate students?

   — jon    Jun 24, 01:31 PM    #

3. Britchky you are right on. Plagiarism is the least of our worries right now. Better yet to stop the slander that appears in our mailboxes every day.

   — Klaus    Jun 24, 04:03 PM    #

4. You cannot demand a person behave ethically. He behaves ethically if he is an ethical person. It is not something he can learn once he is an adult. It is a part of who he is because of how he was raised. He behaves ethically because he has a personal, spiritual reason to do so.

   — deborah    Jun 24, 04:24 PM    #

5. Go Britchky!

   Journalism exists only to perpetuate a cut and paste blogged world—

   — seth    Jun 24, 04:25 PM    #

6. Britchky has it nailed.

   I got out of the media business 25 years ago for the exact reasons Britchky ticks off. In retrospect, the ethical issues of the early 1980’s now seem quaint. At least the Toronto students can’t say “You didn’t tell me not to ____”.

   — Grady    Jun 24, 04:40 PM    #

7. Deborah, you’re right that you cannot demand that someone behave ethically. At the same time, there’s a big difference between someone who is an ethical person and knowing how to be an ethical professional. Being an ethical person doesn’t help you know when it’s ok to throw out an outlier from a piece of equipment you think is malfunctioning, or how to deal with a supervisor’s instructions you think (but don’t know for sure) might be a problem, or how to deal with your department head’s start-up company, or any number of other professional dilemmas. Professional ethics are more complex than simply having a spiritual reason to be a good person. There’s no time when someone can go to sleep as an undergrad and wake up as a grad student or professor and have acquired that knowledge by osmosis. There are things that even the most conscientious professionals need to be taught how to do. And, few ethical dilemmas are between breaking the rules or doing the right thing: often it’s trying to figure out which is the least damaging choice, etc.

   — CKG    Jun 24, 04:46 PM    #

8. CKG writes very thoughtfully about this problem. Many students simply do not understand the concept of ethical scientific behaviour or why it is important. Some others simply do what they are told – the old teutonic “simply obeying orders” defence. There is also the type, not uncommon in leading edge research, who are frighteningly intelligent but treat everyone else in the universe as dog meat. They are so full of themselves that they are convinced that they will never be caught and if they are their accuser will be alone and can be dealt with. After all they are alpha-males or alpha-females and know how to deal with the epsilons. The sky is the limit for the intelligent bully.
   In my career I have personally encountered scientific fraud twice. In both cases I tried to avoid getting involved. In one case I simply showed no interest in getting involved with the students project and I got away with it. That was easy. In the other case it cost me my post-doc job for “lack of progress” on a project. I was supposed to “build upon” a masters project that had just been completed in the lab. After reading it and watching the guy in the lab I concluded there were few genuine results in the work. It did not help that the guy was continuing to do a PhD in the same lab. From talking to colleagues such impossible situations are not uncommon, particularly when you are a foreign post doc or visitor to a lab.

   — Raymond J. RITCHIE    Jun 24, 09:43 PM    #

9. hi understanding ethical issues is very hard.
   =============
   sam
   <a href=“http://www.floridadrugrehab.com”>Florida Drug Rehab</a>

   — samder123    Jun 25, 03:03 AM    #

10. The balance of the sentiment seems to bear on Students. This is surprising because our expereince has been not the Graduate Students are the problem but rather the Dept. Deans and Professors who strive to shine and stand out above the other Departments for the need for infantile level validation.

    SRD

    http://www.bccmeteorites.com/misconduct-planetary.html

    — SRD-BCCM    Jun 25, 07:15 AM    #

11. sam, “Understanding ethical issues is very hard”????

    No it’s not. But, one has to have an opportunity to learn what proper behavior is—we think it is modeled in colleges and labs and somehow that it is passively transmitted to students.

    I taught research ethics and bio ethics at the UW-Madison and, while many students had a hard time articulating or even identifying ethical issues, it was quite easy to teach the ability to identify ethical issues and how to reason through them.
    What is harder to teach is the personal strength required to make the right decision at the expense of self-interest.

    Steven Clark, UW

    — Steven Clark, PhD    Jun 25, 09:27 AM    #

12. The value of an oath isn’t to enforce, it is to create a sense of ownership of the goals. The value of an oath for students (graduate or otherwise) is (surprise)… teaching. Understanding ethics is hard if students aren’t taught about ethics. It may be easy to teach ethics, but if ethical issues were easy, then so many examples of ethical violations in history that led to the development of Ethics as an area of study and so forth.
    By the way, one of the ways to teach “the personal strength required” to be ethical is to have students own a set of ethical principles by having made an oath. Ultimately, of course, that’s a personal characteristic that cannot be guaranteed by all the training, education, and oath-making imaginable.

    — Ray    Jun 25, 10:32 AM    #

13. Ethics starts long before graduate school. It starts in the home and with teamwork between teachers and parents. Responsibility and accountability are key to students building ethics. The parents and teachers must teach and model it and consequences must be enforced early on.
    I have worked with undergraduates and, very briefly, high school students. For some, ethics is just a word; for others, it is a way of life.

    — Kathy Byars, MAT    Jun 25, 10:48 AM    #

14. As Ray says, an oath really does nothing except to make a point. The problem is that many of them (like loyalty oaths) tend to imply guilt on the part of the person taking the oath. All an oath does is point out that whatever it deals with is important to whomever decided you ought to take the oath. The rest is up to you. Anyone who thinks speaking an oath will change behavior is definitely an optimist.

    — Al    Jun 25, 10:48 AM    #

15. Ray’s views regarding creating a sense of ownership of the goals are actually supported by some research I ran across recently. Simply reminding students of an ethical cannon made them less likely to cheat. Apparently we humans respond to ethical issues in a different part of the brain than we do to other types of decisions.

    In any event, having students sign an oath regarding ethics strikes me as chicken soup … it can’t hurt and it might help.

    — Dave    Jun 25, 10:55 AM    #

16. university + toronto + fraud, just google these three words and you will find that it is not the students, but the professors who are plagiarising and concealing plagiarism. A Toronto professor, Paul Pencharz, wrote recently: “It’s the classic Canadian response to a problem like scientific misconduct: Deny, deny, deny. Sweep it under the carpet.” This was in Can. Med. Ass. J. There is still no national research integrity agency in Canada. There is no whistleblower protection legislation of any sort in Canada. The main funding agency, NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) has made it their policy not to disclose to the public the names (and institutions) of persons who commit fraud in science. The number of cases of fraud and plagiarism grows under these policies fast… An oath in this country doesn’t worth anything.

    — Michael Pyshnov    Jun 25, 11:15 AM    #

17. Having students take an oath implies (or sometimes explicitly states) that there will be consequences for breaking the oath. That may be were the real value of the oath comes in—as a reminder that unethical behavior will be punished. Where all students take the oath, it may also serve to make students as a group understand that they are all in this together, and that it is incumbent upon each one to enforce ethical standards. Perhaps it also serves as a warning that ethical behavior matters to the school’s leadership.

    If there is any truth to any or all of these suppositions, than having students take the oath is probably a good thing. One caution, though: If faculty and administrators don’t also take the same oath, than it may ring hollow to students.

    — Tracy G.    Jun 25, 11:16 AM    #

18. How about having Chronicle blog posters swear to be objective and accurate and never to write with false confidence on topics about which they know little but hope much (war, economics, diplomacy, science, …)?

    Could S. Britchky provide a citation for the “recent analysis” he mentions in his post?

    — RD    Jun 25, 02:29 PM    #

19. Undoubtedly, there have been ethical violations committed from both sides of the desk (student/faculty) and from the head of the conference table (administration). Perhaps, however, in better addressing ethical issues with present and future student populations we can reduce the future ranks of unethical faculty and administrators. After all, don’t all faculty and administrators start out as students?

    — Sara S.    Jul 1, 11:13 AM    #

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