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Comment by stanford_labrat | Hacker News Reader

To give some perspective, nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”. This is an ethics class and it specifically covers things like falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models etc. At my institution we actually had two whole lectures related to this, one was specifically about image manipulation and the other was about falsifying data.

Another very high profile article related to Alzheimer’s and plaque formation was also recently retracted…weird. I’ve become very skeptical these days, of my fellow scientists, which is both a good and a bad thing.

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After a scandal in our institution with medical professors publishing in pay-for-play journals, we were required to take an ethics class. Our PI scheduled this for 10 am, and not knowing better I booked an hour of time and brought a notebook.

The presentation was two slides. The title slide was presented, and then a content slide was presented. Professor's lecture on ethics was, in its entirety, "You guys know enough not to be unethical. Don't be unethical." We pretended to be learning from the second slide while someone took a picture to present to administrators, and the ethics class was dismissed. I had 55 minutes of my hour left.

Unethically completing an ethics class was one of the most ironic experiences I've ever had.

I’d be the dude calling it out right there in the lecture and getting fired for misbehavior…

What would your goal be in calling it out? Admin mandated ethics training, so it is either going to happen or it is going to "happen".

Professor is not getting grants to make research ethics slides, so he's not going to do it. The group needs a volunteer, but everyone else is already busy with assigned tasks. Would you volunteer to run the ethics training and do it properly?

> Would you volunteer to run the ethics training and do it properly?

Yea but I doubt they'd have me. I'm just a disruptive individual. With regards to the question of why I would make a scene in the lecture, it's because of the contradiction of agreeing to be ethical and at the same time walking out of the ethics lecture knowing it was meaningless. It's the complicity in society that leads us to being led by a bunch of fucking jellyfish.

Sounds like it was an exercise in compliance box-ticking. It’s like an honest DEI seminar.

> To give some perspective, nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”.

Unfortunately, I think that these sorts of classes mainly serve as either CYA or to check a box for a funder.

Most of the folks who do unethical stuff (in general) either think that what they are specifically doing is not unethical, or they just don’t care (“playing the game” is something I’ve heard quite a bit).

In certain fields, especially if you include anything that’s in a gray area of ethics, unethical behavior is more the norm than the exception.

Or worse, it's just teaching people what types of fraud are detectable.

> nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”

I think that is a broad generalization. I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.

> falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models ... image manipulation.

My take is that this may be a "field"-dependent class. My PhD is in a non-experimental field (math); thus, we cannot have these sorts of issues (minus plagiarism).

I think this is a requirement for PhD programs funded by T32 training grants from the NIH.

> I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.

What often happens is that a given program is required to include an ethics portion or course, so the university has some mandatory class whose syllabus reads "this class will include an ethics portion".

Then there just never seems to be the time needed to get to that material.

At least, that's how my computer science degree went.

FWIW, I did a PhD at University of Michigan, finishing in 2014. We did have to take this class -- I gather that the university put off implementing it for quite a while but eventually they gave in and did it. Nobody involved with it really seemed to want to be.

A lot of the class consisted of videos, the contents of which were mostly irrelevant to mathematics (dealing with things like falsification of data). The people assigned to teach it (it was someone different each week) would try to talk about what was in there, but there wasn't much to talk about because so little of it was relevant to math (mostly just plagiarism, as you say).

In an attempt to do something useful with the remaining time, most of the professors ended up turning it into something of a career-and-publishing Q&A, answering questions about various issues (though not really ethical issues) that can come up in writing and publishing papers. <shrug>

(I seem to recall one of the professors tried more seriously to actually stick to the material, but he was an exception...)

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