Laboratory ethics: What makes some scientists cheat?

Surveys show that the public consistently holds scientists in high esteem, perhaps leading many people to assume an unrealistic ethical purity among them.

If lapses happen in business, "the public says, 'Well, what did you expect?' " says Mark Frankel, director of Scientific Freedom, Responsibility, and Law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science. The public tends to be more surprised when the violators are scientists - although public esteem remains high despite the lapses, he adds.

Biomedical research in particular is a hotbed of economic and scientific competition. Several countries, including South Korea, are vying with the US for leadership. So the pressure to lead can be huge.

Dr. Hwang's request last week to withdraw his team's paper on stem-cell work, published in May in Science, has spurred editors at the journal to ask whether their peer-review process of evaluating papers for publication could have caught problems in the Hwang submission.

"A paper that apparently achieves a result that others have tried to get and failed is subject to especially careful scrutiny," says Donald Kennedy, Science's editor. "I expect a certain amount of skepticism" among reviewers as they give papers the once-over. "On the other hand, I think reviewers generally tend to trust explicit representations" of the information in the papers.

Science is generally self-correcting, says the Hasting Center's Dr. Murray. If a paper is published and other scientists fail to reproduce the results, it is likely to get relegated to the trash bin.

In the end, no system is infallible, ethicists note. "If you have someone determined to fabricate evidence, no screening system will catch that," says Alto Charo, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in biomedical and research ethics. "You have to rely on the integrity of the individual."

In the past decade, federal funding agencies have put more emphasis on ethical research practices, requiring grant recipients to take ethics courses or giving grants to scientists at universities with ethics classes for graduate students, notes the AAAS's Dr. Frankel. These courses have undergone little evaluation for effectiveness, but several cases that made headlines this year came to light after fellow researchers or young protégés became suspicious of data being used and blew the whistle on their errant colleagues.

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