SCI2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Animal Ethics, Antibiotics, General Medical Council
25 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 9
Lecture 1 – Ethic 1: Scientist behaving badly and how to prevent it
What are ethics important in scientific research?
• To avoid harm
o Animals or people
• To prevent environmental damage
• Protect intellectual property
David Resnik – reasons to adhere to ethical norms
• Knowledge, truth, avoidance of error
• Protect intellectual property interests while encouraging collaboration
• Ensure that researchers who are funded by public money can be held
accountable
o Paid by tax payers
• Help to build public support fore research
o Public has right to know it is done accurately
• Promote a variety of other important moral and social values
Research Misconduct
• Includes fabrication, falsifications, plagiarism or deception in proposing,
carrying out or reporting the results of research, and failure to declare or
manage a serious conflict of interest
• How frequent is misconduct? – David Resnik
o ~0.01% of researchers per year (confirmed cases)
o ~1% of researchers per year (anonymous self-reports)
o Has large ramifications on science and society
• E.g. of unethical but NOT misconduct
o Discussing with your colleagues confidential data from a paper that
you are reviewing for a journal
o Stretching the truth on a grant application in order to convince
o Overworking, neglecting or exploring students
• Why does misconduct occur? – David Resnik
o Bad apple theory: only researches who are morally corrupt,
economically desperate, or psychologically disturbed commit
misconduct
o “Stressful” or “imperfect” environment theory: misconduct occurs
because various institutional pressures, incentives, and constraints
encourage people to commit misconduct
▪ Misconduct arises from environmental and individual causes:
when people are morally week, ignorant or insensitive
Vancouver protocol for authorship: three key requirements
1. Data
• Idea, concept, design or analysis
2. Writing
• Drafting, commenting or editing
3. Overall Responsibility
• Should have seen all content
• Intellectual responsibility for your part
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Reasons why people don’t contribute
• Biased
• Lazy
• Vested interests
• Career/promotion
• Fame/prizes
Five Common Mistakes for New Scientists (Inadvertent error)
1. Rule out data that does not support my hypothesis
2. Extrapolating beyond range of data
3. Hypothesis doesn’t equal explanation
4. Does it need testing?
5. Correlation versus causation
Is science moral and ethical?
How is a decision made – an ethical dilemma
• Against editor’s decision
o Science is amoral: does not make moral judgement
• Supportive of his decision
o Science is primarily a societal organisation: science is a community
with moral responsibilities
• Undecided
o Haven’t thought about it
Codes of Practice
• Advise and regulate members of an organisation about ethical issues relevant
to the domain
• Allow dissatisfied clients an avenue of appeal
• Defines what’s OK and what’s not OK
Self regulation through Three Ideals of Science
1. Universalism
• Piece of science research should be judged based on the quality of the
science itself
• Doesn’t depend on
o Who did the research
o Where it was done
o Where it was published
2. Peer review process in publication
3. Repetition
• Science is self correcting process
Professional misconduct in Science:
1. Jan Hendrik Schön
• Ph D Konstanz from Germany
• Worked in the Bell laboratories
• ~100 papers in 6 years
• His work was accepted for publication through normal peer review
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
