Chapter 1
Research Ethics: The Best Ethical Practices Produce the Best Science

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER

• Research science is increasingly complex with pitfalls and temptations.
• Global competition and cooperation will likely change the face of science in the future.
• Science is an iterative loop of ideas, funding, data, publication, leading back to more ideas and research.
• Ethics can be a guide toward best practices.
• Best scientific practices lead to the best science results and discoveries.
• Best practices and mentorship give rise to the best scientists.

It is increasingly difficult to be a research scientist. The number and complexity of rules, electronic forms, journals and publishing, and university regulations are ever‐growing. The competition for funding is often ruthless, and the criteria exacted to warrant publication in good journals also seem to be on the rise. Indeed, not just the pressure to publish, but the pressure to publish the right papers in the right journals is also increasing. Nominally, the preparation of proposals and publications has been ostensibly made simpler by computer technology, yet the potential for real‐ and faux‐research productivity has also been enabled by computers. Technology is a double‐edged sword, enabling high levels of knowledge creation as well as enabling research fraud and shoddy science. Thus, ethical dilemmas seem to be appearing at an increasingly rapid pace, with research misconduct regularly being the subject of news articles in Science, Nature, and The Scientist. Even people who do not keep up with science news are familiar with breakthroughs in science and controversial developments such as CRISPR babies. While the most notorious cases of misconduct have occurred in higher‐profile fields of science, such as physics and biomedicine, it is clear that no area of science is immune to unethical behavior (Judson 2004; Ritchie 2020).

We live in a “multi” world. Multitasking, multidisciplinary work, and multiauthored papers, to name a few, are ingrained in the fabric of science culture and certainly multi‐multi is expected in order to succeed and move up the scientific ranks. The isolated small laboratory with the lone professor and few staff (see Weaver (1948) for a perspective) has given way to larger labs interacting in complex collaborations in interdisciplinary science. Complex relationships are accompanied with tough decisions regarding authorship, dicing the funding pie, and how to treat privileged data, and immense amount of data at that, which are shared (or not) and curated in useful and meaningful ways (or not). In all this mix, the temptation to cheat, cut corners, and misbehave seems to be at its zenith for scientists wishing to compete at the highest levels of science, become tenured, and then become rich and famous. Well, ok, realistically, most of us are challenged to name more than a handful of scientists who ever became rich or famous. Of course, one alternative to honest competition and competence, as seems to be the case for some scientists, is to con their way to the top. Cheating is front page news in business, politics, and sports news alike. Perhaps a bigger problem to outright fraud is cutting ethical corners. Thus, we have an apparent paradox – the antithesis of this chapter title – that the best (or highly rewarded) science is compromised with seemingly endless ethical issues. Whereas the lone professor and his or her graduate student worked in simpler and more linear paths in the past, modern science seems far too convoluted for its own good (Munck 1997). How can we win? How can sound science prevail in the face of all the obstacles?

If the situation is not complicated enough, it seems that there are growing concerns about the abuse of graduate students and postdocs by their mentors. Some senior scientists feel that coercion, micromanagement, and general overbearance of their trainees are effective means to ensure high productivity. While research misconduct garners headlines, causing all sorts of angst upon university administrators, it might be the case that defective mentorship is actually a much weightier problem than outright cheating (Shamoo and Resnik 2003). But is it possible that these two problems could be interconnected? Mentorship is a perennial hot topic in science that has spawned cottage industries, self‐help books, and strategizing among faculty members and university administrators alike. Everyone knows that finding good mentors is crucial for the young (and sometimes not‐so‐young) scientist wishing to be propelled into a sustainable career in the academic world of research and teaching or the private sector of research. Mentors, after all, know the unwritten rules of science and can share these with their trainees. Mentors are responsible to explain how these rules are intermeshed with research ethics and advice on best practices. Mentors should help their students and postdoctoral trainees fulfill their dreams (should their dreams involve being a scientist). Indeed, these features define good mentorship. Bad mentors can shatter dreams and stagnate their trainees' careers. But perhaps even the best mentoring is not effective to deter certain research misconduct.

Research misconduct is a major threat to science. As much as some scientists wish to point fingers at politicians and the public as the principal bad players responsible for lack of appreciation and funding that science deserves, I think the real enemy is within our own ranks. Indeed, Brian Martin (1992) maintains that modern science, the “power structure of science,” is to blame for much misrepresentation in research. Essentially, publishable data (indeed, stories) must be novel to be publishable in the sorts of journals that scientists need to publish in. According to Martin scientists are not allowed to “tell it like it is” and must “sell” publishable stories (he calls them “myths”). Nonetheless, blatant untruths in publishing are typically rooted out as research misconduct. Papers found to contain false information – created either by misconduct or honest error are typically retracted. Research misconduct is insidiously damaging to the credibility of science and scientists in society since it erodes trust – not only in the individual researchers but in the system of science itself. Self‐patrolling the profession from within is critical to reverse this damaging trend; the major pinch points for detecting research misconduct are when grant applications are submitted and when manuscripts are assessed at the editorial level and peer reviewed.

The ethical dilemmas in data collection, collaboration, publication, and granting are likely to become even more complex and vexing in the future. More than ever, graduate students and postdocs must master more techniques, technologies, and concepts in order to become and stay competitive in science. At the same time, scientists must generate good ideas and raise increasingly scarce funds to make their research a reality. Global competition from scientists in rapidly developing countries, especially in Asia, is a new fact of life for the researchers in the West, who were quite accustomed to the deck stacked in their favor. Researchers in China, India, countries in the Middle East, and in other rapidly developing countries are enjoying increased levels of new funding and increased status in the world of science. These new resources are coupled with even higher government and institutional expectations – not only for results and publications – but groundbreaking publications in the most prestigious journals. From East to West, being a practicing scientist is certainly not getting any easier. The picture is not all doom and gloom, however. Honestly, I can think of no more exciting time to be a scientific researcher than today with the booming innovations and opportunities to be found around every corner. For example, between the publication of the first edition of this book (2011) and the second edition, I essentially reset my lab to perform synthetic biology research with new funding sources and collaborators. This transformation has led to new facilities and innovations. Such innovations are also enabled by our ability to connect with other scientists and stakeholders across the globe nearly instantaneously these days. Certainly, the positive science news outweighs the negative news and complications, but there is great consensus among scientists and others that the science system, while considered to be self‐correcting, can go awry.

It was around 2006 and 2007 that I became convinced, for all the above reasons (as well as others discussed later in this chapter), that a new course at my university needed to be taught on research ethics to graduate students. Thus, I embarked on learning a lot more about ethics, research integrity, and the many topics that touch responsible conduct in research. After a couple years teaching this new graduate course, I decided that a book of this sort could be helpful to support it, but also as a general help to young scientists just starting their research careers. A few years later, the first edition of this book was published. Over a decade later, I found that a lot had changed (well, mainly, people had come up with new ways to cheat), and a second edition was due.

This book could be viewed as part guidebook, part virtual mentor, and part friendly polemic that should be helpful in addressing pragmatic...