A few days back, I wrote about my attempt to expose my undergrads to the concept of research ethics. It was a very interesting exercise, and I plan on doing it again next semester.
The class (approximately 10 students) was broken off into three groups, and each group was given a scenario pertaining to research ethics and questions to consider during the class discussion portion. A typical example of a scenario is as follows:
Student XYZ is asked to perform an experiment, and his/her advisor expects there to be a linear relationship between the independent and dependent variables. After the experiment, several data points do not fit the linear trend.
In this case, students are asked to consider A) re-measuring all of the data, B) re-measuring only the outlier cases, or C) ignoring the data points that don’t fit. When polling the class, the overwhelming majority appeared to have recognized the prudence of doing something about the non-linear data points (albeit the bare minimum…i.e., option “B”). Interestingly, several former analytical chemistry students noted that the non-linear points might be statistically insignificant, a notion verified through a G-test (kudos to me for actually teaching them stats last semester!!).
As the authoritarian figure, I emphasized the importance and responsibility of reporting the “true,” objective answer and the consequences for doing otherwise. I was surprised to see that students had not considered that scientific misconduct could damage your professional reputation, a concept I tried to illustrate by talking about the Bell Labs incident, although it was heavily based in physics, not chemistry.
Furthermore, most students didn’t realize that a Ph.D. could be invalidated; having learned this in grad school, I’m not very surprised. Nature published a very interesting article a few years back about scientists who were implicated in scientific misconduct cases (Nature 2007, 445, 244-245), many of whom have been stripped or his/her Ph.D. Perhaps, I’ll work several of these instances into future iterations and/or seminars about this topic.
In any case, ethics is an ongoing area of research (at least for me).
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