Word: frauds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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UNETHICAL CONDUCT AMONG politicians--even those in high executive office--or Wall Street traders may call for an investigation. And the procedures are fairly well-defined, because wheeling and dealing is all part of the game. But disclosure of fraud in science is another story. The recent retraction of "incorrect" research by scientists in the laboratory of Ellis L. Reinherz at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has made it clear that the procedures for coming to grips with such fraud need to be better defined...
...research process is predicated on the myth of its autonomy from such pressures. Hence the shock value and significance of disclosures of misconduct. The scientific community is apparently not in need of preventive medicine for the misconduct of its members. Rather, self-scrutiny should determine to what extent such fraud is a problem in the scientific community at large...
...system of peer review of research articles and grant proposals roots out unconcious bias in scientific findings. But the recent case of research fraud involves something else: conscious bias. The system of self-regulation in the scientific community works well as a watchdog of the former, but simply was not made to deal with the latter...
...continuously functioning oversight apparatus is in order--rather than the case-by-case investigation committees that were called into action after the fact by the Dana-Farber and by the National Institutes of Health. Clearly fraud does not call for an inquisitorial committee shackling the research process, but an investigation of the extent of misconduct in the scientific community...
Harvard Medical School itself witnessed a major case of fraud less than four years ago, when John R. Darsee admitted to a series of fraudulent published research findings on heart disease. The line between the pure realm of academic research and the "pressures" of profit and personal gain has perhaps never before been tested as it is now in this era of high-profile science--an era that has witnessed the rapid commercializing of biomedicine...