BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XVIII

Consequences of Unethical Conduct, Part 1

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea.

Scenario: In a proposal you are reviewing for a federal funding agency, you find data that are not those of the Principal Investigator who authored this proposal, but unpublished data generated by you and your collaborators. The source of these data is not credited, that is, there is no mention of a “personal communication” and no citation of a publication either, all of which implies that these data are those of the author. The data are central to the core of the proposal. You e-mail one of your collaborators, relate the situation, and ask for input. This colleague is angry at the news and then becomes frustrated when you refuse to say who wrote the proposal in order to guard the confidentiality of the author. You write a scathing review of the proposal.

In the fictitious scenario above, the ethical breach of the author was compounded by multiple ethical breaches of the reviewer. Ethically, one is never at liberty to discuss a proposal with others. E-mailing compounded the problem because that is a public medium highly subject to search and review. Indeed, the e-mail constituted gossip by the reviewer and his/her colleague. Not revealing the name of the author was a band-aid to the mistake that served only to irritate the colleague. Did the reviewer have a conflict of interest in reviewing this proposal, or was she/he within ethical professional boundaries?

Let’s make plain the underlying tension we all face as scientists and teachers: How do we train and inform each other to handle ethical situations that arise in peer review without compromising the need for confidentiality? If you are like me and, I wager, most PIs you have never been formally trained for peer review, one of our most important professional responsibilities. Indeed, you may never have been trained how to review either a manuscript or a proposal; you are just supposed to “learn by doing” or by some form of osmosis. To remedy this issue, many graduate programs now have “Grants Writing Workshops” for incoming graduate students that often include peer reviews among class participants. Although a step in the right direction, this is at best a circuitous approach to learning how to handle ethical breaches in peer review.

Bob Cleland, a past president of ASPB and professor at the University of Washington, designed a graduate seminar course in which students read and review published papers from the primary literature with an assigned role of author, reviewer, or editor of the journal. The actual citation can be obscured and the “manuscript” submitted to another journal of one’s choosing. The “authors” write a rebuttal to the critique of the “reviewers,” and the “editors” arbiter the final acceptance decision. Surprisingly often, “authors” and “reviewers” get into heated discussions in defending “their work”! You can add a layer of complexity by having a classic, high-impact paper “submitted” to an inappropriate journal so that despite rave reviews the “editor” is forced to reject it. I introduced this format to a Molecular and Cellular Biology Program run by the UW medical school with the same suite of positive effects on students: They said it imparted a sense of the ethical issues involved in scientific reviewing and forced them to read the literature more deeply and critically, to think and learn about the missions and profiles of journals they read, and to become more gentle colleagues to others. From the professor’s perspective, the writing of most of the students also dramatically improved as they learned to craft and defend an argument. The professors at UW who have used this teaching method learned how to craft better reviews themselves and found that ethical issues surfaced naturally during the course.

To explore other ways of teaching ethics, see www.aaas.org and search for “ethics.” The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has collated a wealth of information on ethics, including ideas on how to teach it and how to deal with specific hot-button topics such as religion and bioethics, evolution and bioethics, and the like that arise in teaching. Centers devoted to ethics such as the Hastings Center (www.thehastingscenter.org) or the Poynter Center (http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter) are also excellent resources.

Do we really have to teach this stuff? How frequent are ethical breaches in manuscripts and grant proposals? Unfortunately, far more frequent than any of us would like to admit. Not a day goes by that I do not learn about several cases via the news, scientific journals, or e-mail (witness the recent case at Harvard University; see http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=80&sid=134809). Every time a new, high-profile ethical breach occurs, scientists—all of us—lose credibility, and respect for the ivory tower erodes.

Indeed, in response to the frequency of ethical breaches, most journals run by professional societies, ASPB included, now have published policies for handling allegations of ethical misconduct. Such breaches are not new, but the policies have been instituted because there is growing awareness that the government and the public expect us to train and police ourselves. In addition, there is not a discrete higher authority, like a Program Project Officer, to turn to for structured advice when such breaches arise in journals of professional societies. Following normal ASPB procedures, the Society’s policies were carefully crafted by the Publications Committee during 2002 and 2003 in consultation with legal counsel. The Executive Committee then discussed and edited a draft of the document. A final policy was ultimately approved in October 2003 (http://www.aspb.org/publications/ethics.cfm).

Having touched on the consequences of an ethical breach in publishing, next time we will discuss consequences of a breach at the national level in a grant proposal.

Next time: Government policies and consequences in bioethical issues, continued.

Dina Mandoli
mandoli@u.washington.edu