Opinion about scientific purity

I would like to talk about two aspects of Fraud, thanks to the case of Diederik Stapel at Tilburg University. The idea behind this is that you cannot talk about fraud in general, when you are blind too the big fraud just around the corner.

The two points I would like to discuss.  First: fraud in science is not a matter of psychopathology – alone. Second : How to cope with Fraud?

First:

It can’t happen here. That’s what most scientists in Tilburg would tell you about fraud in science – till last august. The general feeling is that science is magically self-correcting, fraudsters are isolated incidents, fraud is something that happens in those other professions. Well, we were quite wrong.

And having lost our naivite some of us will go a little bit deeper to find out more concerning integrity in scientific research. What do we see? The scientific enterprise is unquestionably afflicted by ethical, financial and bureaucratic woes and dilemma’s, as often reported in Nature and elsewhere. But these problems might have a bigger impact on scientific integrity than most of us realize.

And if that is the case, psychopathology – the establishments way of putting scientific misdeeds away and outside our consciousness – is no longer the primary factor. Rather, the disorder is integral to modern science, inevitable arising from inadequate mentoring, veneration of high-volume publication, chases for grants and glory, political pressures for practical results, and insufficient budgets that inspire ethical shortcuts.

Dangerous pathologies infest the culture of science. They have been little touched by ethical commissions at universities or university-schools; neither by the ethical tutoring of graduate students, retention of laboratory records and other data, and systematic enquiry into fraud allegations. More important than the guilt or innocence of individuals is the protection of the scientific process and the integrity of the scientific record. These are increasingly neglected values in the intensely competitive world of modern science. One of the reasons Fraud is an interesting subject tonight for debate is that all the courses for ethical business in the Tilburg school for econ0mics have ended in the bachelors fase.

Still, I think that the main threat to scientific purity today originates in corporate money aimed at co-opting the good name of science for the pursuit of profit, as revealed in recent pharmaceutical scandals. Withholding of clinical research data unfavourable to pharmaceutical products, concealment of financial interests in drug trials, ghosted papers for the promotion of drugs, and lucrative consulting deals for academic and medical ‘ thought leaders’ are among the techniques that have surfaced. Maybe we can be happy that our relatively small university does not have an Academic Medical Center with this kind of research. However, most universities have not done all they should to protect the integrity of research. Many have not even shown they are seriously concerned about doing so.

To conclude this first part: we were a scientific community that was trapped in its own sense of infallibility. We have lost the idea that  “it doesn’t happen here”. We might be a little bit too proud on the idea that science in Tilburg is self-correcting. It really took a long time – and quite impressive and obvious mistakes of Diederik Stapel himself to get caught. We can really be proud of the whistleblowers who took a lot of risk. They wouldn’t have been the first ones who went public and got fired

Second : how to cope with fraud.

I would propose two lines of answering the question how to cope with fraud in the context of our university.

The first line, can be derived from an understanding of what you might call a business culture with ethical elements. Fraud permeates all types of institutions today and now the world of science, the last bastion of respect and trust, is no exception. Dozens of cases have been uncovered in the past quarter-century-and the headlines continue. We can no longer shrug off fraud in science as the work of a few individual scientists. Instead, we must look for its causes and its remedies in the structures and cultures of the scientific institutions themselves. That starts here with the report of the Levelt-advise group. We have to look carefully for all details of all types of scientific fraud and how they happen; we have to consider the self-government of the sciences, including peer review and the refereeing of papers; and we have to expose the failures of academic, governmental, and legal responses. And of course there is a movement toward Internet publication of papers which promises remarkable new checks on fraud and suggests how we can restore and defend the integrity of academic culture.

That is one line. The other one is a plea for an academic culture which has far bigger interest in the world of theater and literature. In this inter faculteit symposium I would like to make the statement that students read better and more newspapers. Why?

The fraud here at the university or a far bigger fraud like the Enron default about ten years ago, ask always for the people involved to take a hard look at themselves. And listen very well to stories like

“In the Titanic, the captain went down with the ship. And Enron looks to me like the captain first gave himself and his friends a bonus, then lowered himself and the top folks down into the lifeboat and then hollered up and said, ‘By the way, everything is going to be just fine.” (senator Bryan Dorgan – USA)

We need again a feeling for classical tragedy. What we can see in the case of the rise and fall of professor Stapel and the rise and fall of Enron is that they both, among a lot of other things, show us the most theatrical of entities, they show us games, and illusions, and maybe most of all a system of belief.

And there our moral senses are triggered, we give a critical examination of some of the values around us, the ethics of the bubble of academic status and the great bubble of money making.

Diederik Stapel as well as Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced former CEO of Enron, were both “the smartest guy in the room”, and therefore both can be seen as a full-blown tragic protagonist – an academic and a corporate Macbeth. Both of them begin full of the airy belief that they have reinvented the world on their own terms, and they both end beset by their own demons as that world crashes around their ears.

We don’t have those kings and emperors any more, the stuff of traditional tragedy, but these kind of professors and corporate CEOs are probably the closest we come to it. They make decisions that affect the lives of many people, and they were often undone, as we have seen, by status, greed and may be even worse.

We see in their lives the same kind of hubris. Though what is extraordinary is that we had all watched this happen and yet still we want to believe in the illusion of superb research and financial miracles. There is a criminality in that faith, and I suppose we were all to an extent guilty of it. What you come to realise, really, is that a lot of what went on made no sense even to the people who were very near to it. Intelligent people were mesmerised by the numbers. And therefore my last question: are intelligence and goodness intertwined, or not? I feel uncomfortable about the fact that intelligence isn’t really related to goodness at all.

Henri Geerts is programmamedewerker bij het Academic Forum van de UvT.