Ethics in research: Why and how?

Abstract

Over the last few months several cases of fraud and dishonesty in research have been disclosed and highlighted in the media. The examples are not only from speculative experimental stem cell research in the Far East, but also from the field of ‘‘alternative medicine’’ and of cancer epidemiology in Scandinavian countries. What is going on? Is fraud in research increasing due to the increased competition and pressure on researchers to ‘‘publish or perish’’, or are these events clustering by chance? As in many previous cases these recent stories involved well-recognized researchers publishing in prestigious journals. In one case there was also a fight over the ownership of research ideas, plagiarism, and patents.In another case unethical use of staff members as research persons was disclosed in addition to falsification of data. Ethics in research has two dimensions: one is ‘‘research ethics’’ and defines the rules of how research should be conducted, especially when it involves animals or human beings, whereas ‘‘researcher’s ethics’’ has to do with the researcher’s own moral obligations, e.g. to be honest and objective in presenting and interpreting his/her own research, to be fair to peer researchers, and honest to the society as a whole. Obviously, these two lines of ethics in research have strong connections and it could be expected that researchers, whose moral virtues are less well developed, may both offend the principles of objectivity and honesty and conduct the research neglecting the rights of the research subjects. Clearly in both cases the risk for individual research persons and for the confidence for the scientific community as a whole is at stake. How common is it?