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Published online 8 August 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1015
Column: Muse
Crime and punishment in the lab
Before we ask whether scientific misconduct is dealt with harshly enough, says Philip Ball, we need to be clear about what punishment is meant to achieve.
Is science too soft on its miscreants? That could be read as the implication of a study published in Science this week1, which shows that 43% of a small sample of scientists found guilty of misconduct remained employed in academia, and half of them continued to turn out a paper a year.
Scientists have been doing a lot of hand-wringing recently about misconduct in their ranks.
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One point is that in the absence of efficient policing and enforcement of the misconduct rules, an easy way out is to deal out maximum penalty to those who are caught. Taking Hwang as an example, how are we to know whether his past behavior might be predictive of his future actions? And how is the scientific community going to give 'intense scrutiny' to his future papers? I could envision his papers being banished to some small journals from now on, but I don't think anyone will bother repeating his every experiment to check for reproducibility of results. Even that won't be enough, as the original researchers will resort to the standard defense - "You are doing it wrong" (just look at the situation with ALS mice models at http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080807/full/454682a.html). My opinion is that people like Hwang are the least of our problems. The biggest problem holding back scientific progress is the stupendous attitude that the first researchers to publish positive results in a peer-reviewed journal must be right. This form of thinking is downright illogical and unrealistic. It takes months to investigate scientific fraud and retract the fabricated papers. However, for an improperly done study, it'll take years and decades to accumulate enough data, provide an alternate explanation, and turn opinions around, not to mention the potential political fallout of such actions and the immense difficulty for obtaining funds to set the record straight and prove the original study wrong. And if you're still not convinced that tolerance of this pretentious attitude is harmful, be reminded that the idea of homeopathy retained credibility in some scientific circles because of a study published many years ago in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal named Nature.