Over a year ago, we published a special report about fraud in science. One of the articles in the special quoted Darrell Smith, from Vanderbilt University, as saying “Graduate students would do anything to please their principal investigator”.

Dr. Smith then wrote to us to clarify that “To suggest that a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow would do anything to please their principal investigator indicates a willingness to engage in unethical, illegal or immoral conduct”, something that, he felt, was unthinkable for most graduate students and postdocs, who “are committed to high ethical standards in their research and would not engage in misconduct to please an advisor”.

This weekend, I got a letter from someone called Chris Muller, who disagrees. He writes:

“A bunch of us were discussing Dr. Smith’s commentary on how graduate students and postdocs have their own strict codes of conduct and ethics that makes them think of science first, and their PIs and their careers only afterwards. How noble! How pure! […] I personally know graduate students, postdocs and technicians who HAVE TO think of whether their PI will be happy with a given result, and if it doesn’t match the “desired” outcome, well, then they do the experiment till it does. If they didn’t do this, their survival, their degree, their ability to earn a livelihood based on their chosen profession would be threatened. It’s that plain and simple. What would you tell these poor sods — to destroy their own ambition and lives to please some abstract, non-existent, popular notion of selfless and ethics-driven professional suicide to appease even ruthless careerists who spend most of their time traveling for PR, writing grants and schmoozing their way into committees to influence policy-making and, in the process, earn THEIR livelihoods and vacations to exotic, tropical and skiing locations?"

The last question is somewhat confusing, but he seems to doubt that there is such a thing as a strict code of ethics worth upholding because, if you were to stick to it, you would be committing professional suicide. Quite a radical view, although I must say that, at Nature Medicine, we have seen cases of students or postdocs who fudge data, and we have seen our fair share of referee reports that say “it seems that these people will do anything to get the right result”.

To say that in science there will always be all kinds of people — those who stick to their code of ethics no matter what and those who fudge data to please their PI — is a platitude. What one would like to know is if Dr. Smith is right and we are looking at just a few rotten apples or at a terminal patient with metastasis in every organ. My own opinion, I regret to say, is closer to the metastatic view.

And yours?