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?

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued their final report on the lab mishaps at Texas A&M University, a damning 21-page laundry list of the university’s incompetence.

The report also details the corrective actions necessary to get the biodefense labs, which have been shut down for more than two months, up and running again.

Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Eddie Davis, the university’s interim president, said university officials weren’t happy about the level of compliance.

I wrote about this story for our September issue, but in short, the problems at Texas A&M began in February 2006 when a researcher at Texas A&M University stuck her head and arm inside an aerosol chamber to spray the walls with disinfectant and developed the bacterial infection brucellosis. The university managed to keep the incident under wraps for over a year but the CDC eventually found out and ordered the labs closed.

The CDC’s report finds among other things that “administrative controls to prevent workers from being exposed to biohazards were not adequate” and that “most of the workers assigned to support the high-containment labs were unaware of the potential hazards of their work environment.”

These are serious charges but at the press conference, Davis seemed defensive rather than contrite. He claimed that missing vials of dangerous agents were likely to have been the result of inventory problems and later added, “Other institutions under that same level of review would probably have findings that could be reportable to the CDC.”

That’s a sobering thought given the extent and seriousness of the safety breaches at Texas A&M. For all our sakes, I hope he’s wrong.

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine’s news intern.

Last month the state of Iowa shelled out $925,000 to settle a lawsuit filed in 2003 by a handful of people who, 70 years ago, became unwitting participants in a stuttering study that left them psychologically scarred. For some, the money came too late. Three of the six study participants represented in the lawsuit had already died. The cash went to their sons and daughters via their estates.

The trial, which was later dubbed “The Monster Study,” began in 1939. At that time (and to some extent today), stuttering was thought to be an inherited disorder. But renowned speech pathologist Wendell Johnson, himself a stutterer, had a hunch that kids could be made to become stutterers simply by being labeled as such.

To test his theory, he and his team hand-picked 22 children from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home—10 stutterers and 12 not—to participate. The children were subjected to either negative therapy (“you are a stutterer and need to work on your speech”) or positive therapy (“you speak like a completely normal child”). Though only 5 children were true stutterers, 11 children in the study were told they had a speech problem. Johnson’s grad student Mary Tudor also offered “helpful” advice: don’t speak if you can’t speak correctly; take a breath before you say a word if you think you’re going to stutter; stop and start over; put your tongue on the roof of your mouth; watch your speech all the time.

Not surprisingly, whatever ability the children had to speak fluently evaporated quickly. Some resorted to talking in haiku-like phrases (There’s a jar. There’s a fox. Got a coat on). Some stopped speaking altogether.

No one can deny that the experiment was cruel and inhumane. But that was 70 years ago. Today there are ample measures in place—institutional review boards, ethics guidelines, informed consent — designed to keep studies ethical. Monster studies are a thing of the past.

Right?

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine’s news intern.

Thanks to The New York Times for correcting their report on our schizophrenia paper.

And while we’re talking about this, they also corrected the report on the Nature Genetics multiple sclerosis articles.

It looks like there aren’t enough interns at The New York Times to do their fact checking.

This past Sunday we published a clinical trial showing that a metabotropic glutamate receptor agoinst could treat people with schizophrenia. We’re of course delighted that the paper received massive news coverage, including the attention of the BBC and the NYT. But in the case of the latter, reporter Alex Brandon wrote that the findings were published by the journal Nature, which surely doesn’t need any extra visibility over what they already get.

Above and beyond the fact that it’s a shame to miss out on the publicity for our journal, it’s always surprising and a little bit embarrassing that a publication as prestigious as the Times would make such crass mistakes. And it isn’t the first time either. My colleague Myles Axton, editor of Nature Genetics, tells me that, even though his journal published two out of three high-profile papers on the genetics of multiple sclerosis this summer, Nicholas Wade made no mention of Nature Genetics and reported that the findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which published only one of the three papers.

Now, if it’s about making funny mistakes, hats off to the people at AFP, who reported that the paper was published in the fancifully named journal “Nature Science”. Maybe they know something I don’t know, and the paper was turned down by Science before making its way to us. Or maybe our senior management is entertaining a surprise new launch.

Incidentally, I’d like to thank our fact checker for pointing out to me that the NYT reporter who wrote about our paper is Alex Berenson, not Brandon. Maybe we should send him over to the Times to lend a hand.