Ethics in science

There is an interesting editorial in Nature this week about the training young scientists receive in ethical behaviour from their mentors. I reproduce parts of it below. Emphasis mine.

"Researchers have always depended on their seniors to convey the peculiar knowledge of the lab. Techniques, values, scientific judgement and survival skills are imparted by good mentors at the bench and through challenging discourse at lab meetings or in the local pub. Young scientists enjoying such inductions are popularly viewed as the lucky ones, as opposed to those reared on the 'sink or swim' principle.

Melissa Anderson and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis decided to investigate the relative effects of mentoring and formal instruction in setting a young scientist's ethical framework. They analysed the 3,250 respondents from a 2002 survey of about 6,900 grantees of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) who were asked about their formal ethics instruction and the informal mentoring they had received — and how these had affected their subsequent behaviour.

As many as a quarter of the NIH PhD fellows in 2000–01 had not taken ethics courses or been mentored in ethics workshops or discussion roundtables. One quarter of the survey respondents admitted that they did not feel well prepared to del with ethical issues in their work.

More positively, about 90% of both early- and late-career respondents had discussed ethics with their mentors or colleagues and had been mentored in good research practices. Among younger scientists, biologists were among the least likely to have been mentored in ethics. It seems they received more mentoring in getting financial support for their work. Social and physical science postdocs were more likely to be mentored in how to survive in their fields and develop professional relationships.

So does the extent of mentorship and/or formal ethics training correlate with behaviour? The survey asked participants to report various types of problematic behaviours. Formal instruction exerted a disappointing influence on the early-career scientists: in fact, it significantly increased the odds of poor choices when collecting and analysing data, dealing with other researchers' confidential information or allowing funders inappropriate influence. Formal training was also correlated with a higher likelihood of not giving proper credit to others. How could this be? Perhaps such courses introduce scenarios that were unimaginable beforehand while suggesting that others have got away with such behaviours.

The results of mentoring early-career scientists were better but still mixed. Research mentoring (teaching good practice and presentation of one's results) and ethics mentoring decreased the likelihood of bad behaviour in almost all categories. But receiving mentoring advice on how to survive in the field and form professional relationships, or on how to support one's research, increased misbehaviour."

That biologists get more training in writing grants than ethical behaviour I can readily believe. Its a dog-eat-dog, publish or perish, we'll scoop you if we can, no tenure if you don't have the moolah, world out there. I see PIs all around me feverishly writing...for about 6 months of the year. So, thats spot-on.

Its interesting that formal training increases the chances of misbehaviour. I don't buy that "others got away with it" theory. Surely the fact that you are presented with those scenarios should act as a deterrent, rather than encourage you. Especially when you discuss them in the context of an ethics course, where the misconduct is dissected in detail, and everyone is saying as loudly as they can that the people who did it are scum. I don't understand this one at all.

Oh well. I should just stick to writing frivolous posts about silly movies and dishwashers. This stuff makes my last few gasping grey cells writhe in agony.