Horacio Cardo

The Citizen-Scientist's Obligation to Stand Up for Standards

n April 2, I appeared at a symposium for students and teachers sponsored by the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a remarkably successful high school founded by Dr. Leon M. Lederman, a Nobel laureate in physics, to foster young people's interest in science.

The symposium, called "Science, Technology and Society: Ethical Awareness for Tomorrow's Leaders," was convened to discuss the way ethical issues might be explicitly raised for young scientists.

I was somewhat hesitant to appear on a panel on ethics because, like almost all scientists I know, I have no formal training in this subject. Indeed, like many of my colleagues, I have been reluctant to include formal courses on ethics in the physics curriculum, and I have tended to suppose that students should learn the ethos of science "by example."

Presumably, in laboratory courses and in research projects with faculty, students can learn the values of honesty, creativity and full disclosure that are the hallmarks of good science. Also, in spite of the implicit hierarchy associated with education, students should get a sense of the "anti-authoritarianism" of science: that there are, or should be, no scientific authorities whose views are not subject to question.

Indeed, proving one's colleagues (and oneself) wrong is one of the great pleasures of scientific progress.

Scientific ethics have been mightily tested of late. In my own field of physics in the past several years, two important examples of scientific fraud were uncovered in subfields as diverse as molecular electronics and nuclear physics. In each case the fraudulent results were brought to light relatively quickly, but not before they were published in articles involving numerous co-authors who should have been more skeptical.

This lack of internal critical review has prompted much hand-wringing. It has also raised an issue of ethical responsibility: do scientists who take credit as co-authors of papers need to verify all of the results cited in those papers?

The problem is that by nature science does not deal well with fraud. Scientists assume some basic level of honesty in the scientific enterprise, and while we expect mistakes to occur, we do not anticipate deliberate obfuscation of the facts.

Moreover, scientists tend to expect that ultimately the truth will win out without explicit and immediate action on their part. Future experiments that do not reproduce earlier results will expose fraudulent experimentalists, while theoretical nonsense will be exposed when it leads to nonsensical predictions.

Nevertheless, confronting misconceptions, deliberate or not, our own or others', is probably the single most important factor driving progress in science, and in a broader sense society. Scientists must not allow nonsense to remain unconfronted, regardless of whose sensibilities we offend. Once we allow empirical truth to be blurred with impunity in one important area of human activity, we jeopardize the very basis of a healthy democracy.

Only when we are willing to accept the universe for what it is, without myth or fear or prejudice, can we hope to build a truly just society.

So I found myself in Chicago in early April proposing a possibly unpopular thesis: scientists have a special ethical responsibility at this particular time to question our government's actions. It appears that this administration is marginalizing the recommendations of major scientific organizations on the one hand, while defending artificial "research" to support political goals, or, worse still, manufacturing it.

Empirical constraints that may otherwise guide sensible policy making seem to be evaporating.

When a Bell Labs scientist was shown to have based some of his results on fraudulent data, his other scientific results, no matter how exciting, lost credence. We should be prepared to apply the same skepticism to the political arena.

Last month, the National Academy of Sciences presented the reports of an expert panel that assessed current plans for examining the effects of global warming. The scientists concluded that the research program proposed by the administration lacked the most basic elements of a strategic research plan.