A Rose by Any Other Name Is Still a Rose

We all have jobs that we consider meaningful and, one hopes, that provide both professional and personal satisfaction. There are a number of individual elements about work that contribute to the self-perception of job fulfillment, including the degree of challenge, novelty of the job experience, degree of autonomy, responsibility for decision making, validation of the work by the community, value of the end product to others, and financial remuneration. The precise balance between these factors in reaching a final verdict on job satisfaction will vary from person to person and between different occupations.

It is safe to assume that one universally applicable criterion of work satisfaction is the notion of a job well done. This feature can also be subdivided into two parts—one related to the work product itself and the other to the process by which the job is done. The first component, namely quality of the work product, will have a different meaning depending upon the specific job. For example, a teacher's job may be considered well done if all his or her students pass an accreditation examination. An architect may be deemed successful if the building design fosters cohesiveness among the occupants and fits in with the surrounding environment. Assessment of physician performance may be based on observing if the patients in the practice adopt the treatment plans outlined by the doctor. For a researcher, a job well done means completion of reproducible experiments that yield new and valid information and that contribute to the general fund of knowledge in the discipline.

Thus, it is possible to split job satisfaction and the well-done job into discrete components. However, the second element involved in doing a job well—the work process itself—ultimately converges on a set of irreducible constituents. These include clarity of purpose, selection of worthwhile ventures and quality partners, open communication of goals to colleagues and subjects, honesty in all interactions, and efficient use of human, biological, and inanimate resources. Thus, whether one is a lawyer, marine biologist, physical therapist, bond trader, or pediatric oncologist, there are certain actions that are fundamental to being a worker, and they define an acceptable process by which any job should be done. We rightfully expect all jobholders to adhere to these standards of conduct and apply them appropriately to whatever work they are doing. They represent a set of core actions that define the well-done job.

Arri Eisen and Roberta M. Berry (2002) review the situation that prevails among those whose work involves conducting basic research in the biosciences. They suggest that application of these essential values is not standard practice in this field. They assert that increased public awareness of the scope of expenditures on research, heightened review of this work by governmental and regulatory agencies, and a rapidly changing global work environment make it urgent that this problem be addressed in a systematic manner. They propose that training in ethics be incorporated into the curriculum of all basic researchers.

I have several concerns about this analysis and proposal. First, the deficiencies that the authors enumerate fall into the category of actions that I have defined as constituting the process of doing a job well. They all arise within the practice of basic research and do not extend outside the world of the investigators. I think it is an error to label these issues as research ethics. This leads to the mistaken notion that the solution of problems in the bioscience research workplace requires the application of a set of facts and values external to the discipline itself. It encourages bioscience researchers to turn to a different set of practitioners, bioscience ethicists, to settle disputes. My contention that the relevant professional group should establish the definition of a well-done job is supported by the Good Clinical Practice, Good Tissue Practice, Good Laboratory Practice, and Good Manufacturing Practice guidelines that apply to biomedical research. None...