Responsible Conduct in Research!
This week's Howard Hughes lesson was on responsible conduct in research. Here's my opinion on the matter.
I think the one thing everyone can agree on when discussing research is that there are many different responsibilities involved in this process. There are personal responsibilities, such as simple tasks as cleaning up messes and taking very clear and thorough notes, and there are responsibilites held by those of lab managers and principle investigators to monitor the work that is being conducted in the labs. However, in today's competitive society of science, moral responsibility in research is becoming ever more important. As a researcher, you have a moral responsibility to yourself, your lab, and the people who will benefit from your work to be honest about what you have discovered and the interpretation of that data, regardless of whether that information is beneficial or not.
In my opinion, research misconduct is becoming a bigger issue as the world struggles to find cures to diseases and conditions that affect many. Some of the driving factors that lead to research misconduct are pressure from peers, supervisors, and the general public to find vaccines and cures, the race to obtain credit and awards for certain discoveries, the competition involved in recieving grants, and even the desire to finally finish your scholarly work.
There are several ways to help minimize misconduct in the research community. One is for those heading labs to play a more active and hands on role in the projects being conducted in their labs. Review boards at research centers, colleges and universities, and science journals also help to identify misconduct once the information has been written in a formal manner. Most importantly, education of the moral issues that go along with research misconduct is very important. Sometimes knowing how many people can be negatively affected by your wrong doings is enough to keep people from falsifying data or claiming someone elses as their own.
So, research responsibility is a serious topic and I'm very grateful that it was included as a lesson in this program. Not only did I learn a lot about the pressures within the scientific community, but I also had the chance to be introduced to an amazing movie (And the Band Played On-based on the book about the discovery of HIV/AIDS) that deals with the matter.
I hope you have learned something by reading my blog! Feel free to read the retracted paper I found on the BRCA1 gene. The paper discusses the gene as being involved in tumor suppression and a form of DNA repair. Although much of the data is thought to be accurate, one of the writers has unfortunately been found to have falsified data, which resulted in the retraction of the paper.www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/281/5379/1009.pdf
