PHYSICS TODAY took a welcome step in devoting its November 2004 issue to ethical concerns. (See that issue for articles by Kate Kirby and Frances Houle on page 42 and Caroline Whitbeck on page 48.) But the focus on treatment of junior researchers, scientific trust, and interactions with society misses ethical issues associated with the gradual transformation of pure science into big business. In the two decades of flat government spending on science and technology prior to 1990, the fraction of funds allocated to projects over $25 million increased1 by a factor of 26, and the trend continues. So far, the ethical impacts of this transformation have been obscured by better-publicized concern over "corruption of science" by the biotech and defense industries. But with physics departments dwindling in the US and abroad, we need to gauge the effect of ethical issues on the health of our field.
As one example, what position are scientists to adopt if the scientific premise that justifies their $100 million project is removed before the hardware is completed? Do they follow scientific method and accept that a hypothesis has been falsified? That would be the favored choice for an individual researcher. But is it a realistic option for a project manager faced with laying off scores of scientists and engineers? The pressure is intense to set aside ethics and follow the lead of certain drug companies that, when they receive bad news about adverse side effects, suppress or delay release of the inconvenient evidence.
In this interesting new research environment, solution of an important scientific problem is more likely to be greeted with consternation than enthusiasm. Pressure exists to preserve, or even invent, suitable problems that justify big science. Despite its proven effectiveness, individual problem-solving with modest resources is increasingly questioned, at least in part because it is easier for both universities and federal agencies to administer fewer large grants. Even the award structure of our professional societies increasingly rewards acumen in preserving scientific problems to maintain stable funding, rather than skill in solving them. Some evolution of norms is understandable, but impacts on intellectual integrity also need to be considered.
Pressures on ethics are increasing throughout science. But the impact is likely to be felt most in the physical sciences, whose main appeal is raw intellectual challenge—the biosciences presently provide young researchers an easier path to fame and fortune. Future National Academy of Sciences planning for physical sciences research needs to balance the undoubted need for a certain amount of big science against the pressures on integrity that accompany too much reliance on large projects. We need to act soon. At present, the brightest youngsters have trouble differentiating the big business of science from the many other big businesses with similar ethics and better career prospects.
Reference
1. B. Dalrymple, Eos Trans. Am. Geophys. Union72, 1 (1991).
I want to present another facet of today's ethics. I work for a company that is a vendor to the astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and defense communities. I and my colleagues have seen a nearly total disregard for protecting a vendor's proprietary information supplied with hardware, and even proprietary information supplied for a request for proposal (RFP).
For technical documentation and software, we require from our customers a license agreement that allows the proprietary information to be used for maintenance and archival purposes only. The information represents many person-years of company development and is at the heart of every product we build.
One university put our source code for our telescope control system on an unprotected website. Another university sent a section of our source code to a competitor asking if they could improve it. Another institution used our schematics to make a major change in the hardware so the customer could implement a competitor's software under a different operating system.
A government laboratory passed on to another institution the part numbers from our drawings. Another government lab left complete documentation for a state-of-the-art scanner on a table next to the device in an unlocked and unattended room for six weeks; the documentation disappeared.
A government observatory used our proprietary drawings to make unauthorized wiring changes. After we reminded them that they had violated the terms of the license agreement, they made unauthorized changes a second time.
Recently, we responded to a university's invitation to bid for a telescope. The invitation was replaced with an RFP that contained new specifications, including our carefully marked proprietary information from our initial response.
In most cases, the people responsible for divulging the proprietary information admitted they had never been briefed on the care and control of proprietary information and didn't even know that their institution had signed an agreement.
There is more to ethics than was discussed in the November articles.
On any problème du jour, and these days it's ethics, a person must go through some visible motion to convince all interested parties that "something" is being done. The process has a therapeutic effect: Frustrations get vented (often anonymously), the judgments of "experts" gain support, and one gets to imagine that the "bad guy" at least feels bad; all these outcomes are quite uplifting. Ethics is always in plentiful supply as long as problems happen elsewhere. Or, as Otto von Bismarck put it: "Principles are held high as long as one is not held to them."
After people's nominal attention to ethics has been exhausted, will there have been that grand catharsis, with crooks arrested and abused students redeemed? Stop dreaming: In our society the ultimate enforcement is through the legal system, where the only winners are the lawyers. Put differently, the cost/benefit ratio of following through on most perceived injustices to the satisfaction of the presumably injured simply doesn't warrant substantive action. A student's gripe against his professor has very different opportunity costs compared with salvaging a university's reputation.
In science, those who fake data a priori set their own trap and will be caught, aside from the sad fact that they never understood the ultimate privilege of scientific pursuit. Those folks are taken care of automatically and inevitably. The rest constitute a social problem, not a scientific one, and I'd like to offer some specific actionable observations for younger folks out there:
Science is done by people and therefore is not exempt from social problems. Start by genuinely coming to grips with that. It's a fundamental fact, not an aberration.
Inquire about your new collaborators and your boss carefully, as you would about salary and benefits. If an institution has a bad reputation, stay away. Money won't make up for it. If you've lost all confidence in your chain of command, consider having worked there a bad investment, pull up stakes, and move on. Don't play hero and destroy yourself; better yourself. Change your job, change your boss, change your institution, and choose better next time. No white knight will come riding to your rescue, ethics guidelines in hand, and behead the guilty. So stop waiting for one.
Once you have folks working for you, step up and lead by example. You'll find it's easier to demand standards from others. Once you lead, you get to hear both sides of the argument and do something about the issues raised, even if you don't agree with the view of the complainer. Be explicitly generous with giving credit, and conscientiously short-change yourself. People will see that you're not primarily interested in yourself, and you will earn their trust. It's one of those magic hard-earned ingredients of leadership. I've had the huge privilege of working for several men who lived that way.
If a sleazeball does get caught—and it happens!—relish the sight and let him know you do. Consider his demise a strength of your organization, not a weakness of it. Besides, leaving someone dangling at the gallows for all to see has been an effective deterrent for thousands of years.
After all the ethics discussion has died down, some people will continue to cover their tracks and maybe add another layer of obfuscation; and it will work, too. Some will continue to seethe inside but hang on; who knows why? Only a few who have wavered already might actually change—for better or worse. By far the largest group will continue to do good work with decent colleagues and bosses, as they always have. To close with a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole town will be clean."
Georg Albrecht
Livermore, California
It is not surprising that junior members of the physics community would respond so forcefully to questions about professional ethics, or that their major concerns are about abuse and exploitation rather than the more conventional ethical concerns of plagiarism, faking of data, piggybacking of authorships, and the like. When papers that came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories were shown to be based on faked data, the physics community responded with loud calls for immediate reform and with conspicuous expressions of shock and shame. But when graduate students and postdocs, by the thousands and over a period of many decades, complain about their working conditions and their powerlessness, the physics community shrugs and says, "Yeah, so what else is new?"
Kate Kirby and Frances Houle wrote, "Particularly shocking to the task force was how often the words 'abuse' and 'exploitation' were used to describe the treatment of graduate students." However, members in the academic community could be shocked by those words only if their eyes were glued firmly shut to what goes on around them every day. When abuse has become habitual and acceptable, then it no longer is perceived as unethical. Instead, it is perceived as "business as usual."
As long as we have a system in which the professional survival and advancement of junior members of the profession depend on more established members of the community for Letters of recommendation, all the ethics training in the world for professors will be for naught unless someone is held accountable for abusive and exploitative behavior. Many senior physicists, with or without training in ethical behavior, will be supportive mentors, while others will continue to exploit and abuse.
It would be nice to think that professional organizations, such as the American Physical Society, and funding organizations, such as NSF, would make a serious effort to eliminate as much abuse and exploitation as possible from college and university campuses. However, I doubt that significant motivation exists to do so. After all, abuse and exploitation of junior scientists typically do not make the newspapers; they occur away from the spotlight of public scrutiny. Instead, strong motivation at the junior level is what has led to unionization of graduate students and postdocs on some campuses.
Although significant actions may be taken and improvements made with respect to the relatively rare conventional unethical behaviors, I doubt that anything significant will happen to ameliorate the abuse and exploitation that the junior members of our profession so eloquently describe. "Business as usual" is, as a physicist might describe it, a stable con_1figuration.
And in case anyone is wondering, I'm 55 years old, a PhD, and a senior staff physicist in a corporation.
About a decade ago, my colleague Bonnie Wylo and I1 surveyed a subpopulation of the physics community to determine if there was support for courses dealing with ethics and, if so, what topics would be usefully addressed. Interestingly, there seemed to be more support for ethics courses from the respondents outside academia than from those in it. Given that most students we teach do not wind up with academic jobs, issues faced by physicists in non-academic environments deserve some attention in ethics education.
Eastern Michigan University has been offering Ethical Issues in Physics, a one-hour discussion course, for about 15 years. The issues it covers were modified in response to our survey. Students become familiar with statements from the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and various engineering organizations. They examine issues related to research and to the interaction between physicists and society. Although the course was originally conceived to cater to research physicists early in their careers, it now also is important to the education of future high-school teachers. Accrediting agencies have cited this course as a strength of our teacher education program.
Reference
1. B. Wylo, M. Thomsen, Sci. Eng. Ethics4, 473 (1998).
Fortunately, my experience as a graduate student included an adviser who had genuine concern for my welfare and was willing to consider the opinions of other faculty members regarding major decisions that affected my progress. I have taught only in departments that do not have a doctoral program. Therefore, I feel fairly free to voice my opinions without concern for departmental or career politics. I do, however, have an ongoing interest in the subject because, periodically, the best and the brightest of my students ask for advice concerning a choice of graduate school. My perceptions of the treatment of subordinates lead me to consider two primary causes of the abuse that is certainly present.
First, faculty members are not hired for their advisory abilities. Much of the "abuse" is not mean-spirited or cold-hearted behavior by advisers. It might better be described as neglect or even incompetence. The abuse results from the practice of hiring and promoting physics faculty members on the basis of their promise as researchers (or, for administrators, their promise as grant writers). They are not hired for their promise as instructors or supervisors, or on the basis of their people skills.
A second possible cause of the abuse of doctoral candidates is that advising decisions are made by an individual with no oversight. The culture of many PhD-granting departments is antithetical to external oversight of the treatment and guidance of students, or of acceptable conditions for finishing one's degree, beyond a vague notion that it should not take "too long." The first rule of faculty-to-faculty relations is that one does not meddle in the relationship between adviser and student.
Consequently, one finds supervisors who are in a role they have never filled before, and who were hired for abilities and skills unrelated to supervision. They then operate in a culture that precludes almost any form of unsolicited advice or direction concerning that role.
Students who take things into their own hands by trying to transfer to a new research group find a number of major hurdles. First, work done with the previous adviser is effectively erased, and that can cost a year or more of study. Second, the number of advisers willing to pick up transferring students will be limited, because advising a student who has left another group due to a disagreement is viewed by some as meddling.
In essence, the only check on an adviser's behavior is the long-term effect of chasing away graduate students—namely, the resulting low research and grant productivity. Of course, by the time that has happened, many graduate students will have been served up as cannon fodder, and the professor may have already been granted tenure.
Some form of external oversight is needed, and the adviser's power must be dispersed. Each department should adopt a formal and openly published policy for the treatment of graduate students. The Statement on Treatment of Subordinates (PHYSICS TODAY, November 2004, page 43, box 1) is a good starting point, but it needs to be more specific. The published policy should then be a guiding document in the advising that should become the responsibility of the student's entire research committee.
Currently, most dissertation committees serve mainly as gatekeepers. Instead, a student's work should be presented twice a year to the committee for a balanced assessment. To mitigate possible bias toward the primary adviser's opinion, the committee members should put their assessment in writing before they engage in any collective discussion of the student's progress. As a positive byproduct, the committees would then also have some ethical oversight of the entire department's research practices. Committee members would be the first "outsiders" to see the results, and they would hear first-hand about the methods and practices. Some common ethics violations cited in the ethics survey in Figure 1 of Kirby and Houle's article could be addressed at this stage, well before publication.
With the involvement of the entire committee, the rules concerning meddling would eventually become irrelevant. The advice and guidance provided would be normalized by including more experience and points of view. New faculty would have some introduction to their advisory duties, starting with their very first student. Research is rarely done in isolation, and advising should not be done in isolation.
Kirby and Houle reply: The range of ethical issues in physics is certainly far broader, as noted by Frank Melsheimer and Peter Foukal, than those we focused on in our article. We share Jeffrey Marque's frustration that abuse and exploitation of graduate students and postdocs has long been overlooked. One goal of our article was to bring this concern to the forefront in the physics community. We hope that with awareness and good leadership, physics departments and their chairs can take steps to prevent and, where necessary, ameliorate abusive and exploitative situations. Joseph West is correct that the mistreatment of subordinates often arises from neglect, lack of management skills, and lack of awareness of the responsibilities that are specific to supervising students. Thus it is critical that departments establish a structure to prevent abusive treatment and to communicate a set of expected ethical behaviors.
While surveying physics department chairs, we heard about several college and university departments that have highly successful ethics programs or courses. The Task Force on Ethics Education of the American Physical Society will, we hope, help the physics community become more aware of such programs so that departments can implement them. Clearly, education about ethics needs to extend far beyond guidelines concerning data fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to include the development of mentoring skills, understanding of supervisory responsibilities, knowledge of intellectual property rights and obligations, and appropriate processes for resolving ethical problems.
I offer a modest proposal. I recom- mend the establishment of a clearing-house for inquiries about research conduct and ethical behavior. There are many occasions when someone is uncertain about how to proceed and may be too junior or isolated to seek local guidance. In addition, ethics questions, particularly for a junior scientist, may be related to the senior scientist he or she would normally ask. Such a clearing-house would encourage a climate that would lead to good behavior. The method could be a moderated electronic mailing list where questions are posted in an anonymous, hypothetical, and timely fashion to ensure privacy.
Since this letter was written, I found a clearing-house, Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists (http://www. ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org), by which nationwide toll-free telephone calls or e-mail questions are rapidly answered. The entity I propose could emulate AdviceLine. I'm grateful to Casey Bukro, their ethics contact, for details.
I helped set up our research misconduct rules here at Drexel University. Often, ethical problems are not amenable to conventional textbook analysis, and people can honestly and naively misunderstand good research practice.
Whitbeck replies: I am glad to see that PHYSICS TODAY readers are interested in a wide range of topics concerning the responsible conduct of research.
Leonard Finegold recommends a clearing-house for inquiries about responsible research conduct. The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science Ethics Help-line, cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the National Institute for Engineering Ethics, offers such a service. The help-line receives and answers inquiries about how best to respond to ethical problems that commonly arise in research or in engineering practice.
The help-line member in charge at any given time (usually me) decides whether an inquiry is an appropriate ethical question rather than, say, an advertisement or a request for homework help. That person removes any specific identifiers and sends the inquiry to the rest of the team. When a topic seems to require familiarity with a particular setting or situation, the help-line person may consult someone with the relevant experience or may send questions of clarification back to the inquirer. After the team discussion, the member distills an answer from the discussion, which may be a consensus viewpoint, two or more disparate views, or something in between.
We do not use an e-mail list, because we find that a Web form is easier for users. We give inquirers latitude to describe their situation in whatever detail and specificity they think necessary. Occasionally, they turn out not to be looking for help thinking through a particular situation, which is the service we offer. Instead, they want us to issue a judgment against someone. I explain that we have no resources to do investigations, so we cannot issue judgments.
I think we have provided a useful service not only to young investigators and engineers, but to some senior people in well-known research facilities. Our deliberations and advice are not open to public view, although we could offer a more public discussion of typical situations if there is interest.
In my article, I described a discussion method that serves two purposes. It can stimulate the formulation of criteria for responsible conduct that are suited to the conditions of research in a particular area, and it can strengthen a department's ability to communicate with and answer questions for trainees. The method, an inquiry submission form, and scenarios describing open-ended problem situations are available on our website, http://onlineethics .org/helpline. Although many advantages of the method can be realized only by having the discussions within departments, the Online Ethics Center could use the given scenarios, or others that users submit, to discuss a problem-of-the-month in an open, moderated Web forum.
Caroline Whitbeck
(cwrcr@onlineethics.org)
The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science
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