The Iowa State University Model Bioethics Institute

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The OpenSeminar in Research Ethics
1.1 Egoism 1.3 Report falsification

Presentation prepared by Gary Comstock for use by
instructors using OSRE materials. You are
permitted to use, and encouraged to modify, the
presentation if using it in a non-profit
instructional setting and you grant permission
for others to do likewise and you leave this
slide and statement intact as acknowledgment.
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• Goals for this session
• Introduce egoistic ethical theory
• Discuss research misconduct
• Falsification of a photograph

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• Egoism
• The right thing to do is always whatever
  promotes my best long-term self-interests.
• Strengths
• Answers Why should I be moral? question
• Values freedom of individuals to make up their
  own minds
• Emphasizes distinctness of persons

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• Falsification of data
• Fabrication of data
• Plagiarism
• Or other practices that seriously deviate from
  those that are commonly accepted within the
  scientific community for proposing, conducting or
  reporting research.
• Does not include honest error or honest
  differences in interpretations or judgments of
  data. - NIH, Office of
  Research Integrity

Research misconduct
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• Falsification
• Manipulating research materials, equipment, or
  processes, or changing or omitting data or
  results such that the research is not accurately
  represented in the research record.
• Fabrication
• Making up data or results and recording or
  reporting them

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• Plagiarism
• Appropriating anther persons ideas, processes,
  results, or words without giving appropriate
  credit.

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The uninterested author When I was an
undergraduate engineering major I worked for a
time as a student assistant to a engineering
professor, doing hand calculations on the bending
or torsion of beams, there being no Maple or
Mathematica for such things. To assist my work I
referred to an earlier published paper by this
professor and found a mistake in it. I was
shocked when the professor expressed no interest
whatsoever in making a correction. As far as he
was concerned, he'd gotten what he wanted out of
it, a publication, and its validity was of
absolutely no consequence. - Bruce Sherwood,
Physics, NC State
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The uninterested grad student When I was a
graduate student in physics my thesis experiment
was an on-line measurement of the momentum
spectrum of positrons emitted in mu plus decay at
rest (into positron, neutrino, and antineutrino).
V-A theory predicted a certain shape for this
distribution of momentum. I worked hard to make
corrections that went in the direction of making
the data agree with theory, did not look hard for
corrections that went the other way, and stopped
looking entirely when I got adequate
agreement. - Bruce Sherwood, Physics, NC
State
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The responsive discipline In recent years
high-energy experimental groups developed a
wonderful technique to guard against this
particular kind of fudging. They distort the data
by a secret fudge factor, do all the analysis
with the fudged data so that they don't know
whether their corrections are toward or away from
expected values, then at the last minute reveal
the secret factor and undo the fudge. Clever. And
necessary. - Bruce Sherwood, Physics, NC
State
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.
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How common? Graduate students Business
56 Engineering 54 Physical sciences
50 Medical and health-care
49 Law 45 Social science and humanities
39 - Donald McCabe, Center for Academic
Integrity, Duke U. http//today.reuters.com/news/
articlenews.aspx?typeoddlyEnoughNewsstoryid2006
-09-21T120800Z_01_N20379527_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-CHEA
TING.xmlsrcrss
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One case can cost a million dollars.Matt
Ronning, DirectorSponsored Programs
Less than 1 reported? Paul Cousins, Director
Office of Student Conduct
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44 of faculty say they have ignored
cheating. 52 have never reported cheating to
anyone else. Donald McCabe, Sociology, Rutgers
and Center for Academic Integrity, Duke 75,000
students 125 institutions 2 decades
self-reported data using paper and now online
survey 2001-02 data www.lib.washington.edu/about/
events/academic/Pres_2-24.ppt
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Who is harmed by misconduct?
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• Who is harmed by misconduct?
• All graduate students. University research
  increasingly relies on the good will of
  taxpayers. If the public comes to mistrust
  universities, funds will dry up. To wit Grad
  student stipends will disappear.
• Everyone. Research is intrinsically a
  collaborative enterprise. No researcher can know
  everything. If we cannot trust others results,
  progress becomes impossible.

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Apathy Who cares? What's
important is getting the job done. How you get it
done is less important. All I'm doing is
emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out
in the real world. - Donald
McCabe http//today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.a
spx?typeoddlyEnoughNewsstoryid2006-09-21T120800
Z_01_N20379527_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-CHEATING.xmlsrc
rss
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(No Transcript)
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CREDIT COURTESY OF MARY ALLEN
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Assignment Read OSRE modules 1.0 - 1.4 1.0
MY INTERESTS 1.1 Egoism Take the long
view 1.2 Progress to degree 1.3 Report
falsification 1.4 Avoid plagiarism

• Be prepared to discuss
• What is egoistic ethics and why does it claim
  lying is wrong?
• What happened to Elizabeth Goodwin? to her
  grad students?
• What lessons do you take from the case?
• How much copying and pasting does your field
  allow before youre accused of plagiarism?