When I became a doctor (not a real doctor, just yet-another-PhD) part of the ceremony was to solemnly swear to be diligent to the best of my ability and not to falsify my research, something like that, I forget the details. I guess moral behavior has always been taken for granted in the physics community and except for a few high profile cases it has survived unscathed. The reason is probably that basic research is not subject to conflicts of interests mainly because there IS no interest, haw haw. Seriously though, aside from the occasional study of toothpaste as sponsored by a toothpaste company, there is one conflict of interest in academia which has been introduced by design. That conflict of interest is between the career of the individual and the thoroughness of his research. Specifically, by design junior scientists (who incidentally do most of the research) are only hired for short term positions. The idea is that this puts pressure on the researcher and provides the best research. I don’t agree with that for many reasons one of which is that a significant amount of research effort (10-15%) goes towards researching new jobs(!). Another problem is that due to the high specialization hiring committees often rely on the quantity of an applicant’s publications rather than the quality. What this means is that research gets published as soon as it is good enough to pass peer review. Such a “good enough” approach can leave much subsequent carnage in its wake. Specifically when another researcher picks up the subject and figure out all the underplayed/unmentioned difficulties of the article e.g. a graph may look continuous but it’s really made out of two discontinuous functions and you just happen to need the derivative, whoops! Also, we all know that data looks much better when it has been log-plotted. Soldiers have a poetic saying for this structural problem: “Shit rolls downhill!”.
Still I must admit that I was quite astounded by the 100+ pages of “Procedures” with sections and subsections. Also they expect one to know them. “Do no evil” is apparently not good enough. In most cases though, one can typically spot the rotten behavior. Good thing we have multiple choice when Legal or the compliance department can’t be consulted. The funny thing is that I actually questioned the ethics of one of the procedures in my day job. So apparently reading “the law” works.
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