“Do Scientists Compete Unethically” is the title of an article in the New York Times Science section this week by John Tierney. This interesting piece is in response to a previous post on “What If Scientist Didn’t Compete” (here)
Which in both cases has spawned a series of intense debates.
The original post led to the majority of responders online insisting that competition is an essential element of science. This week’s piece is in response to one scientist (Dr Cutler) who’s main point is “Compete ethically”. Dr Cutler points out that there are elements of researchers who are unethical. These examples include reviewers who “exploit their access to privileged data to gain unfair advantages in the “race” to the next big discovery”, and lack of cooperation from scientists for requested published materials. Dr Cutler recommends a system of rewards for ethical behavior such as when it comes to publications and grant funding.
I though this was an interesting post for discussion here on Nature Network. My questions are therefore;
How can we regulate such a system and evaluate ethics?
How widespread do you think this problem is?
Barry- I think the problem of sharing published data, particularly reagents, is an issue. I have had to change my experimental design several times throughout my graduate research because of unavailability of published constructs, etc. It is by no means everyone, as I would say the majority of scientists are quite ethical and willing to share, But you know what they say, it only takes one bad apple…
I work in industry, and it is sad to say, but i cant get pdf versions of ppts that i saw externally from people I work with internally. Maybe part of science is set up with a need to compete, but there must be a way to contribute to collective ideas without being burned and left out in the cold. Competition might make people work harder and more quickly, but at the cost of having the same work done 3 times over, and somewhere in that midst the advantage comes at too high of a cost. The saying i keep hearing is “we all work for the same team”, but it never, ever feels like it.
Those comments on the times article about just taking away all the money, are they serious? are they insane? they shouldnt be allowed to take any medication more complicated than aspirin, let alone benefit from stem cell research in the future.
To address your second question about how widespread this is — pandemic comes to mind (thanks to the recent flu). I must be too young/new/naive or whatever, b/c i dont understand the lack of ethics and lack of data sharing. I thought i stayed out of politics when choosing science as my career.
The suggestions I saw in the article comments about what to do to regulate ethics centered on funding, which might be the answer for academia, but what is the answer for industry? Industry might be a little better off in the repitition department (might be, i didnt say was b/c i really cant generalize something that huge, at least one company wont have 2 dozen people doing the same work, just 2 dozen companies doing it and not collaborating!), but you cant really force people to collaborate within a company even.