The
trajectory of the Hwang scandal highlights the shortness
of the path between unethical behaviour and outright
misconduct
Este é o editorial da revista inglesa
“Nature”, publicado na edição desta quinta-feira, dia 12
(Vol 439, nº 7073):
The trajectory of the Hwang
scandal highlights the shortness of the path between
unethical behaviour and outright misconduct.
The
fall of Woo Suk Hwang represents perhaps the highest
profile case in the sorry history of research
misconduct.
The sheer Shakespearian drama of the
Korean cell biologist’s eclipse, surrounded by fawning
courtiers and plotting groups of acolytes and enemies
and in full view of the television cameras, has left few
researchers of any discipline, anywhere in the world,
unaware of its circumstances.
But what really
makes the Hwang case special is the importance of the
impugned results (W. S. Hwang et al. Science 303,
1669–1674; 2004 and 308, 1777–1783; 2005).
The
claimed cloning of human embryos placed Hwang at the
forefront of stem-cell research, perhaps the most
acclaimed and contentious sphere of modern
science.
It is also the first major misconduct
case to occur during the modern era of carefully
patented biology, in which scientists may aspire not
just to fame, but to fortune as well.
All of this
raises some general questions about ethics and fraud
that researchers had perhaps hoped were put to bed a
long time ago.
Many of these questions were last
publicly addressed in the long and painful aftermath of
the Baltimore case, in which a junior researcher,
Thereza Imanishi-Kari, was accused of fraud in the
laboratory of one of the United States’ leading
microbiologists.
David Baltimore was eventually
vindicated and is today president of the California
Institute of Technology.
But when the allegations
were made, the National Institutes of Health opened an
Office of Scientific Integrity, which was later
downgraded but continues to support fraud investigations
at US universities while seeking to get academics to
teach their students about ethics and
misconduct.
This system, imperfect as it may be,
is still more advanced than that of many other nations.
Elsewhere in the world, cases of fraud have highlighted
considerable shortcomings in the mechanisms for
responding to misconduct.
Another celebrated
fraud case involved Jan Hendrik Schön, a physicist at
Bell Laboratories in MurrayHill, New Jersey, who was
found guilty in 2002 of fabricating results in a massive
and influential string of papers on
superconductivity.
However, the general view of
the Schön case, outside the discipline directly involved
at least, has been that no innocent civilians were hurt,
and the fraud was unearthed and duly punished. There is
almost a nagging sympathy for how such a smart young man
could be so stupid.
The scope of the Hwang
scandal tends to leave these and other recent misconduct
cases in the shade, however. Although the full facts of
the case remain unknown, its multidimensional outline is
already clear.
Barely a stone was left unturned
in his lab’s attempts to secure a positive result. Egg
donors were energetically sought from every conceivable
source — including from junior researchers inside the
laboratory itself, where allegations of coercion have
been made.
In the end, a result was claimed and
the paper published in the complete absence of genuine
scientific evidence to support it.
This will
surely leave some people asking: if this single cell in
the body of science was so malignant, how fares the
rest?
This is an awkward question and one that
many in the community will seek to evade by referring to
the fact that it happened in South Korea and couldn’t
happen here (wherever ‘here’ happens to be).
And
it is true that standards of oversight at many
laboratories would, at least in theory, make this kind
of scenario improbable.
However, research — not
least in the dynamic and fiercely competitive field of
reproductive biology — is increasingly conducted through
international collaborations.
These often involve
working with colleagues in countries, including China
and South Korea, where mechanisms for supervising ethics
and investigating misconduct are at relatively early
stages of development.
It therefore falls to
scientists who take research ethics seriously to
confront the question head on, and to determine what
steps should be taken to redouble our efforts to secure
standards in both the ethics and conduct of
research.
Hand in hand
A first step is to
acknowledge that sound ethics and good research practice
go hand in hand. The international stem-cell community
showed some reluctance to distance itself from Hwang
when serious questions were raised in this journal in
May 2004 about the manner in which eggs had been
obtained for his experiments (see Nature 429, 3;
2004).
As soon as his main US collaborator,
Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh,
announced in November that he was bailing out of his
collaboration with Hwang (see Nature 438, 262–263;
2005), people began to speculate that Schatten must know
there was a problem with the result of the seminal 2004
paper.
After all, they inferred, no one would
leave a wildly successful research group over ethical
transgressions. Or would they?
The leadership of
the scientific community has long argued for a solid
line to be drawn between ethical transgressions — not
informing patients of their rights, sexually harassing
staff, coercing junior colleagues, that sort of thing —
and actual research misconduct, which refers to the
fabrication, falsification or plagiarism of scientific
evidence.
In the wake of the Baltimore scandal, a
congressionally mandated commission chaired by Kenneth
Ryan called for a broader definition of research
misconduct that would embrace some forms of malfeasance
beyond fabrication, falsification and
plagiarism.
His definition didn’t cover
bioethics, but it did class any breach of research
regulations as misconduct.
Ryan’s proposal was
roundly condemned in the community, which fought a
lengthy and successful battle to derail
it.
Researchers feared that the extension of
misconduct investigations to embrace all kinds of
professional laxity would lead to endless, fruitless
investigation and, in particular, elicit groundless
allegations from junior laboratory
malcontents.
It is certainly true that there’s a
distinction between personal misbehaviour in the lab and
outright scientific fraud, and it is perhaps as well
that special investigative procedures are retained
exclusively for the investigation of the
latter.
Furthermore, the question of what
constitutes an ethical transgression may vary between
societies that elect to impose different rules, whereas
scientific fraud knows no borders.
In view of the
pattern of behaviour that led up to Hwang’s disgrace,
however, no one should argue ever again that despotism,
abuse of junior colleagues, promiscuous authorship on
scientific papers or undisclosed payment of research
subjects can be tolerated on the grounds of eccentricity
or genius.
Research ethics matter immensely to
the health of the scientific enterprise. Anyone who
thinks differently should seek employment in another
sphere. (Nature, Vol 439, nº 7073,
12/1)
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