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Mercury, Nov/Dec 1995 Table of Contents

(c) 1995 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

A newly employed Ph.D. wants to continue a project, but her faculty advisor won't let her take her lab notebooks to her new job. A journal editor has received a paper written by a scientist using another researcher's data, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. A faculty advisor thinks his student may have concocted results. What should these people do?

These are some of the ethical dilemmas Science magazine posed on the World Wide Web as part of its ongoing coverage of scientific conduct, and they are not trivial. We would be foolish to think that astronomy does not face the same questions.

So far there has been little discussion of professional ethics in astronomy. Yet the complaints are certainly there. Some surfaced during the 1990 American Astronomical Society membership survey, in write-in comments about the old boy network, mistreatment of graduate students, referee bias, and dubious press releases. Historically, another worry for astronomy has been observer bias. Norriss Hetherington has documented the cases of Adriaan van Maanen's spiral nebula rotation, George Ellery Hale's solar spectra analysis, and Walter Adams's gravitational redshift. All turned out to be spurious discoveries that the observers -- top names in the field -- had wanted to be there. The disturbing aspect of the van Maanen case, in particular, is how the Mount Wilson establishment suppressed the misgivings of Edwin Hubble and Knut Lundmark.

In cases I know personally, people have not received credit or have found their ideas appropriated. They reacted by trying to forget about it. This is the first problem: reluctance to admit that ethical breaches do occur. The AAS does not even have a written code of conduct. A good starting point would be the recommendations, due this month, of the Health and Human Services Commission on Research Integrity.

Even when people want to take action, they have no clear recourse. This is the second problem: lack of procedures to enforce ethical standards. The current, haphazard self-policing suffers from conflicts of interest. Academic astronomers are reluctant to chastise their colleagues and even less likely to make their troubles known to other researchers, let alone the public. It took an anonymous leak to the press this past summer for the misuse of funds by Cornell (now ex-Cornell) astrophysicist Stuart Shapiro to emerge.

The code of silence reflects the worry that if the public found out about scandals, it would lose its desire to support science. But the hush-hush mentality conceals critical issues from the profession itself, makes things look worse when they do emerge, and contributes to the mutual paranoia of scientists and the public. Only by not hiding anything will scientists have nothing to hide.

Openness, after all, is the guiding principle of modern science, the strongest of the checks and balances that enable fallible humans to generate reliable knowledge. These checks and balances are weakened by the increasing stress that scientists are under. This is the third problem: pressures that invite misconduct, large and small. To brake the publishing rat-race, the AAS survey suggested encouraging employers and funding agencies to consider only a limited number of papers on job and grant applications.

Many of the pressures are here to stay, and we must fortify young scientists against them. Too often, however, graduate education carries the wrong implicit message. As one respondent to Science wrote: "If our training programs ask prospective trainees to forgo normal lives for the '110% we expect of our graduate students,' to delay family life until after tenure, or to compete without full access to the rules of the game, our communities will have a difficult time remaining civil and humane."