Integrity is priceless, but investigating it doesn’t come cheap either. An attempt to put a price on probing misconduct has estimated the cost to be at least half a million dollars.
Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York reached that figure by examining the monetary costs of one case at their institution, where a senior scientist was accused of fabricating images and data in a federal grant application (the case is still pending). Their results, published in PLoS Medicine, pegged the direct cost of the investigation thus far at around $525,000. That total includes $512,000 representative of the hours spent on the case by salaried faculty. An additional $10,000 went to wages for security, computer forensics, and IT personnel involved in sequestering lab equipment and copying data from notebooks, hard drives and other electronic devices. Clerical support costs added another $2,500.
And that’s just the baseline. Alan Hutson, a biostatistician and one of the authors of the paper, describes other potential costs, some unquantifiable: “Sometimes the investigator has three or four NIH grants, and we have to repay that money. Then there’s the cost to our reputation that’s even worse than the monetary cost. There’re the innocent bystanders, like the graduate students who have to find a new mentor, redo their dissertation, or sometimes go to another institution.”
Other indirect costs not included in the $525,000 figure include man hours spent on a case by senior administrative officials, the possible loss of pending grant money, and the cost of supporting postdoctoral workers and graduate students who may move to new labs.
The authors of the study note that the US Office of Research Integrity received 217 allegations of misconduct in 2007, the latest year with such data available.
A 2009 survey of scientists published in PLoS One found that 2% of respondents admitted to committing scientific misconduct, and 14% said they had observed misconduct in fellow researchers. Clearly, research misconduct isn’t endemic to biomedicine, but when it happens—as in a recent case at the Kreitchman PET Center of Columbia University, where federal investigators found that psychiatric patients were injected with drugs known to contain impurities—the human cost is front-and-center.