Keeping it Real in Research
Recently, the Howard Hughes fellows watched “And the Band Played On”, a movie about the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and the discovery of the HIV virus. A major part of the film was about the dispute between Dr. Robert Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagnier concerning the discovery of the virus. There has been controversy over whose lab was the first to isolate it, but today, it is agreed upon that Montagnier was the first to discover the virus, but much of Gallo’s work linked it to AIDS. Also, Gallo had been accused of misusing HIV samples granted to their lab by Montagnier’s. Although Gallo’s work has been crucial for better understanding HIV/AIDS, he was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, which was instead presented solely to Montagnier.
Scientists are under a lot of pressure to get their work out to the community and get published in top journals. In science, the highest accolades go out to those who are published in the most noteworthy journals, such as Nature. Unfortunately, these pressures to achieve notoriety have sometimes resulted in misconduct, such as falsification of data. The ramifications of such misconduct can be devastating for a scientist’s career, because one’s reputation counts for quite a bit in science. If you have been labeled as someone who falsifies your data, your reputation will be tarnished, keeping you from receiving grants or seeking top positions of employment. In other words, your career could come to an end.
It’s hard to get away with falsification of data, because often, other scientists in different labs will attempt to replicate your findings. And if they can’t do that, then there’s an obvious problem. So…the moral of the story? Just don’t do it.
“Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness.”
-Gustave Le Bon
