Mentoring the Mentors: The Yoda Factor in Promoting Scientific Integrity

The vision to transform scientific research into a profession that promotes ethical research practices must begin with an educational strategy aimed at strengthening the very life force of the academic research enterprise, namely, the research mentor and mentee relationship. The foremost reason that mentor leadership training should precede teaching research ethics is that ethical value transformation can only be sustained if it occurs at the sociocultural level of the medical research community. Because research mentor relationships make up the infrastructure of the medical research enterprise, they are the key players in the realization of a comprehensive organizational strategy for scientific integrity in academic research. More than any other factor in the learning process, the partnership of the teacher and the student determines the value of an education. In the nurture of that partnership lies the mentor's art (Daloz 1999).

Implementing a mentor-centered curriculum for teaching research ethics requires genuine institutional commitment to accountability for research integrity at the highest level of academia. The principal way that university commitment is manifested is through the establishment of an Office for Research Integrity that sponsors innovative educational initiatives and that encompass the substantive issues and the implicit ethical concerns intrinsic to a given discipline.

A mentor-centered research ethics curriculum needs to advance a transparent deliberative process that promotes responsible mentor relationships across faculties. Vital mentor relationships will then be capable of cultivating an organizational ethics culture that transcends differences in the kinds of research being done, as well as where the teaching and research take place. An interdisciplinary approach to the development of a comprehensive mentoring ethics education program is critical to achieving long-lasting change in an academic research environment. This means that educators with expertise in faculty development and mentorship must collaborate with ethicists and faculty leaders to develop and deliver mentor-centered ethics education.

Mentor educators can teach mentoring skills by guiding bioethicists through the same ethic reflective process that they, as bioethicists, intend to teach to their academic colleagues. In other words, bioethics educators, like all academicians need to reflect on the impact that their negative and positive graduate research experiences have on the quality of the advisor relationships they in turn have with student researchers. This degree of moral reflection is a vital attribute of the mentor ideal and is essential for bioethics instructors to fulfill their promise of integrity in the teaching process. Failing to teach in an ethical way will surely undermine the attempt to promote moral growth through the introduction of ethics into the curriculum (Lisman 1996).

A recent U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) study surveyed guidelines for the conduct of research within medical schools, including the state of the art of mentoring graduate medical students. Several of those guidelines acknowledge the importance of mentoring, stating that "the careful supervision of new investigators by their preceptors is in the best interest of the institution, the preceptor, the trainee, and the scholarly or scientific community" (ORI 2001). Only two mentoring guidelines focus on the psychodynamics of the research mentor-mentee relationship. One of these guidelines makes the point that supervision should be distinguished from advising and mentoring because the personality or temperament of theresearcher is a contributing factor to the mentor role. "Not all researchers make good advisors, some researchers are better suited to direct technicians to perform experiments but may not be suited to providing the time, advice, guidance, and evaluation that a mentor or advisor must" (ORI). This guideline leaves one wondering who makes the determination of which academicians are best suited to be effective and even memorable mentors deserving of Yoda reverence.

It is common practice for graduate students to seek out certain professors as their research advisors based solely on their research interests. Although this is a logical approach, it also sets the stage for conflicts of interest, especially if a research advisor has no understanding of his or...