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The American Journal of Bioethics 2.4 (2002) 51-53



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Institutional and Individual Responsibilities for Integrity in Research

Nicholas H. Steneck,
University of Michigan

Arri Eisen and Roberta M. Berry (2002) argue for the importance of "research ethics" education in the biosciences. Gordon and Parsi (2002) have already questioned whether "the biosciences" can be considered a profession and the implications this has for the recommended educational program. This commentary will explore the issue of integrity in research more generally, focusing on real problems and effective solutions.

What are the real problems that should/could be solved by offering more instruction on research responsibility? Eisen and Berry base their approach to research ethics instruction on the assumption that beginning researchers learn "the traditions and conventions of doing science" as they are trained. This provides them with information on "how to act . . . but not necessarily why [emphasis in original]." Hence the need for instruction in research ethics to help them "cope with 'gray' areas where values conflict, where justifications for one choice or another are not obvious, where difficult decisions nonetheless must be made."

Whether this assessment of needs conforms to the current state of knowledge about responsibilities in research [End Page 51] can be questioned. It has been widely known for well over a decade that young researchers are not routinely taught "the traditions and conventions of doing science" during graduate and postdoctoral studies. Eisen and Berry are correct when they state that "[t]he vast majority of principal investigators in bioscience have received little to no formal training in responsible research conduct." Young researchers are not routinely taught how to manage conflicts of interest, make decisions about authorship, collect and store data, work collectively with colleagues, and so on. The "how-to-act" side of responsible research has been and continues to be neglected in research training.

The need for better training in the fundamentals of responsible research was recognized as early as 1989 by the Institute of Medicine. That same year the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA) required training-grant applicants to "include [in their proposals] a description of the formal or informal activities related to the instruction about the responsible conduct of research" (NIH and ADAMHA 1989; 1990). In 2000 the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) proposed a policy (yet to be adopted) that would extend instruction in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) to everyone who works on U.S. Public Health Service-funded research (ORI 2002).

In each iteration the primary focus of RCR instruction has been research integrity. To assure responsibility in the use of public funds for research, the federal agencies that dispense and monitor these funds at least need to know that researchers have been made aware of their responsibilities as researchers. Many currently are not. Significant numbers fail to follow widely accepted conventions for publication, for reporting conflicts of interest, for using humans in experiments, and so on. These shortcomings do not rise to the level of deliberate misconduct, which by most accounts is infrequent. They do, however, undermine the overall integrity of research and therefore need to be corrected (Steneck 2002). Teaching and reinforcing the importance of responsible research practices (Eisen and Berry's first objective) is a reasonable place to begin.

The same is not so obviously true for Eisen and Berry's remaining objectives for research ethics instruction, which focus on moral reasoning skills and the social and political context of research. Although broad instruction in research ethics, compared to a narrower focus on responsible conduct, might encourage researchers to set higher standards for integrity, to date there is scant evidence that it does. When the lack of clear benefits is combined with the time and expense required to provide effective instruction on moral reasoning or a meaningful introduction to the complex relationship between science and society, it becomes difficult to make a case for the broader approach to research ethics instruction recommended by Eisen and Berry. This difficulty is illustrated by the fact that...

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