A week ago I chauffeured a New York City-phobic colleague to the main branch of the sprawling public library complex so he could research an obscure nineteenth-century writer. The records he needed — articles and a handwritten index from a long-defunct newspaper — had to be ordered in advance because they were so infrequently consulted, and it’s doubtful if anyone had viewed this particular batch of microfilm in years.

It was a small part of a minor reference in an article, and finding out that this particular author had not written on a certain topic — which the researcher suspected would be the case — consumed an entire day. But it needed to be done because it was a tiny brushstroke in the complete canvas of the research question under study.

That’s one of the problems with any kind of research: It is a lot of work for comparably small results.

And it illustrates a bigger problem with research: A dishonest researcher could have faked the results, and no one would have been the wiser. It is almost inconceivable that anyone else, ever, would duplicate the effort of poring over that batch of obscure microfilm, and the footnote that “so-and-so did not address the issue in the newspaper’s editorials during the 1890s” could have slipped into the realm of accepted fact — even if it wasn’t fact.

You may believe — and you may be right — that fudging this particular footnote wouldn’t really hurt anyone. But pick through the rubble at the bottom of the slippery slope of research fraud and you’ll find a recent instance where an accumulation of little lies gained crushing momentum and an entire field of inquiry crumbled in the process.

The case I’m referring to is the research-fraud debacle that resulted in last week’s indictment of stem-cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk by South Korean officials who have charged him with various counts of fraud, embezzlement, and violations of the nation’s bioethics research laws. Hwang claimed that he had cloned stem cells, the so-called master cells of the body that some scientists believe can be manipulated into forming new tissues to replace diseased organs, eliminating the risk of transplant rejection.

Here, a lot of people were hurt by the accumulation of research lies:

• In addition to Hwang and his direct collaborators, a number of other researchers were tarred by the affair. They include a U.S. colleague who attached his name to Hwang’s research; while he is not accused of actively falsifying data, he has been criticized for not doing enough to verify the information passed along by Hwang.
• The government of South Korea once planned to fashion itself into a world hub of stem-cell research in a global collaboration of private and public agencies. Fortunes were lost when the foundations of the project were revealed to have been built on sand.
• Many who are suffering from chronic and sometimes terminal illnesses found their hopes for a stem-cell-based cure crushed under the avalanche of falsification.
• Bioscience in general was wounded by the incident after one of the more prestigious journals of scientific inquiry was forced to retract what had been lauded as a groundbreaking paper dealing with stem-cell research.

I don’t have a solution to scientific fraud. Neither did the editors of the journal that published the phony data, who said that the peer-review process is not designed to detect outright fraud, and maintained that there is a fundamental level of trust necessary for the scientific method to work.

I do, however, see an important message in this about the critical nature of ethics. Ethics — not law, not peer review, not the scientific method, but ethics.

Ethics once was defined as “obedience to the unenforceable.” In other words, what you do when no one’s looking. You don’t throw an empty soda bottle out the car window on a country road. Why not? You’re not worried about enforcement, because you can see that there’s not a cop around for miles. You keep the unsightly bottle on the front seat because you know littering is wrong.

Researchers need to obey that same instinct, and we need to reinforce — at every turn and at every grade level — the concept of obedience to the unenforceable. Why? Because a great deal of research fraud is undetectable or at least very difficult to recognize. For example, you sometimes can make a survey say what you want it to say by stopping the survey when you get the result you desire. A promising drug might look more promising if you subtly don’t choose the sickest patients to test it on — and if you’re the one doing the choosing, you may get away with it.

You can change profoundly the answers to a poll question by tinkering with the question. I used to send half of my students in a large lecture class out on the street to ask, “Do you favor increasing benefits to disabled veterans even though it means raising taxes?” and the other half to ask, “Do you favor raising taxes to provide increased benefits to disabled veterans?” When disabled veterans were mentioned first, the majority of respondents usually said yes; when taxes were mentioned first, the majority usually said no.

Journalism has seen its share of “research fraud” lately, some of it in the form of cooked-up quotes that were discovered only after the pattern of falsification became so egregious and obvious that it could no longer be ignored. Dishonest reporters sometimes are trained to lie by their early successes in deception, because a sporadic falsified quote from an anonymous source can be, under practices and policies at many news organizations, totally undetectable. An editor can’t check a reporter’s every word — just as none of us can verify the honesty of every part of every transaction in our personal and professional lives. We have to extend some level of trust, and that makes us vulnerable to deceptions big and small.

It appears from press reports that the South Korean research disaster started with small deceptions that snowballed into a bigger and bigger lie. A prominent co-author apparently didn’t make the extra effort to check out suspiciously promising results. A junior scientist began on a path to deception by subtly exaggerating research results to gain favor with his senior professor. Pressure to make a public splash with groundbreaking research seems to have resulted in a rush to get results into print too quickly without adequately checking them out — a problem with both the scientific and the popular press.

The moral? Every researcher in every endeavor needs to remember that big lies start small and start easy.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

Readers respond to last week’s commentary, “America 1, Moussaoui 0“:

From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, Moussaoui’s life sentence was the only viable option when you consider that had he been executed, he would have risen to the Islamic equivalent of sainthood, with celebrations and acclaim to be used to encourage other young Muslims to follow in his path and to further justify their own quest for blood. I support the death penalty in limited situations, but in his case the harm to us would have exceeded the harm to him.

– J. Peter Rushworth
Roswell, Georgia

* * *

I am mixed about the lack of capital punishment for Moussaoui … and also wonder about our perception in other parts of the world. During Desert Storm [the first Gulf War, initiated by U.S. forces in 1991], terrorists shot at a bus of American soldiers in Jeddah. They were caught, tried, convicted, and beheaded within a matter of days — a definite “show trial” with no time for appeals or stays of execution. Does the rest of the world see us as weak because we refuse to take revenge? Is the fact that we let Moussaoui live going to breed a whole new rash of kidnappings and demands for his release? Are we all going to whimper away at each other, divided, untrusting, and selfish? Do we give in to the desire for revenge, or do we stay rational? Even though we set a good example, have we so compromised our moral authority in other areas, so now no one will trust us or follow?

– Alan W. Neil
Marengo, IL

“In the field offices, corruption wasn’t always the highest priority. The director recognized the need for greater clarity and priorities. I don’t think anybody recognized the number and quality of cases we would generate.”

– Chris Swecker, the FBI’s top criminal enforcement official, talking to the New York Times about the agency’s renewed focus on prosecuting corruption cases involving public officials. The effort has been led by FBI director Robert Mueller, who told the Times that public corruption is especially pernicious because it “leads to cynicism, it leads to distrust in government.”

The FBI’s push has “yielded an unexpectedly rich array of cases,” according to the Times: “In 2004 and 2005, more than 1,060 government employees were convicted of corrupt activities…. The number of convictions rose 27 percent from 2004 to 2005.”

(“F.B.I.’s Focus on Public Corruption Includes 2,000 Investigations,” New York Times, May 11)

WASHINGTON
The revelation that the National Security Agency has compiled a massive database of telephone calls, domestic and international, has prompted ethics-based objections from both sides of the political aisle.

USA Today broke the story last week, reporting, “The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth…. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.”

One company, Qwest Communications International, refused to cooperate with the agency, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The revelations echoed a controversy that surfaced last December when President Bush admitted that he had signed secret orders authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on terror suspects.

The purpose of the newly revealed “data mining” operation is to draw relationships among numbers called and look for patterns that could reveal terrorist plots, according to the New York Times.

Similar webs woven from phone numbers called by the 9/11 hijackers were able to snare more involved in the plot, but the effort took many days. Theoretically, having numbers already stored in a computer database would allow authorities to follow leads much more quickly, and what is known as “social networking” software can illuminate relationships that might be otherwise invisible to investigators, the Associated Press reported.

While President Bush initially did not issue a comprehensive public statement about the report, he used his Saturday afternoon radio address to defend intelligence-gathering activities. According to a transcript from CBS News, Bush said, “The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.” Without specifically confirming the existence of the database, Bush said that, “Americans expect their government to do everything in its power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties…. That is exactly what we are doing. And so far, we have been successful in preventing another attack on our soil.”

Democrats made it clear that the issue may impede the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden, a former head of the NSA, to be the new Central Intelligence Agency director, according to the New York Times. And some Republicans, including Arlen Specter (Penn.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern over the revelation and promised hearings into the extent of the data mining, according to the International Herald Tribune.

The newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher surveyed editorials from major national papers and found outrage from both the left and the right. The Washington Post, presumed to be left-leaning, conceded that data mining can be legitimate, but “a giant government database detailing which phone numbers called which other phone numbers … is a massive intrusion on personal privacy.”

The Chicago Tribune, generally thought of as a right-leaning publication, echoed the same theme in a Friday editorial: “This sounds like a vast and unchecked intrusion on privacy. President Bush’s assurance Thursday that the privacy of Americans was being ‘fiercely protected’ was not at all convincing…. Based on the newspaper’s reporting, this effort appears to go far beyond any surveillance effort that would be targeted at terrorist operations.”

But despite the furor, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that most Americans actually support the data-mining program. According to the survey, 63 percent of respondents said the NSA program was an acceptable way to investigate terrorism. Only 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, according to the Post.

A weekend poll from USA Today found significantly higher opposition to the government’s actions, with 51 percent against the database and only 42 percent in favor.

LONDON
British newspapers are calling for a major public inquiry into the actions of security forces in the months leading up to the last year’s July 7 suicide bombings, claiming that recent government inquiries largely have covered up intelligence failings.

Two internal probes, one by the Cross-Intelligence and Security Committee — a parliamentary watchdog group whose members are appointed by prime minister Tony Blair — and another by the government’s Home Office, cleared British intelligence agencies of negligence but pointed to “gaps” in intelligence gathering and operational failures apparently caused by under-funding, according to reports from the Guardian, the Times of London, and the Agence France-Presse.

Most of the shortcomings cited involved leads that were not followed and a climate of disbelief that a bombing plot could be hatched and carried out on British soil, the Scotsman and the Daily Mail reported.

The Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, and the Independent last week were among major papers joining the call for a public investigation, which has been demanded also by the families of the 52 terror-bomb fatalities from the July 7 attacks. Such an investigation so far has been rejected by Tony Blair’s Labour party, according to the AFP.

The tabloid Mirror carried a harsh May 12 editorial blasting the internal government probes, asking, “Why has the government refused a public inquiry into the worst terrorist attacks since Lockerbie? Is it because they don’t want the Iraq war to be blamed for the bombings in London which cost 52 lives?”

An editorial published the same day by the Independent noted that while “hindsight is always an over-rated faculty, and it is quite possible that nothing at all could have prevented four disaffected British Muslims from killing themselves and 52 Tube and bus passengers in London on 7 July last year … the general hand-wringing that emerges from the two reports that have now seen the light of day — the one by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, the other an official government “narrative” — amounts to a far from satisfactory verdict on the gravest peace-time attack on mainland Britain.”

SEOUL
Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who became a national hero after claiming to have cloned human stem cells — and who tumbled to international disgrace after it was disclosed that his research was fabricated — last week was indicted in South Korea on criminal charges.

He faces counts of fraud, embezzlement, and violation of South Korea’s bioethics laws, according to the Associated Press.

Several colleagues from various research institutes also were indicted, according to the English-language version of Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s largest-circulation paper. Prosecutors concluded that Hwang was deceived initially by a junior researcher who exaggerated test results to please his boss, but that Hwang eventually became complicit in the plot, the paper reported.

The Korea Times reported that the government will seek the return of what amounts to about $31 million in state-granted research funds. According to the report, critics have questioned why so much government money was funneled to Hwang without the state checking on the integrity of the experiments.

If convicted, Hwang could be sentenced to ten years in prison.

Hwang’s research had raised hopes that scientists could clone stem cells to repair and replace diseased tissues and organs in order to treat conditions such as liver failure or Alzheimer’s.

WASHINGTON
Who should get the first doses of available flu vaccine — a grandfather with a weak heart, for whom the flu shot might literally be a lifesaver, or a healthy teen likely to survive the flu but with decades of life ahead of him?

Such questions are at the forefront of an ethical debate as health officials confront the moral dimensions of a possible pandemic.

As the Associated Press reported last week, U.S. government guidelines put the grandfather at the head of the list under a policy that favors protecting those most at risk.

But bioethicists writing in the journal Science last week argued that the “save the most lives” principle behind U.S. and Canadian flu-shot policies should be re-thought, according to the CanWest News Service. Bioethicists Ezekiel Emanuel and Alan Wertheimer say scarce flu vaccine should be rationed based on “the amount the person has invested in his or her life balanced by the amount left to live.”

According to a report from the CBC, Emanuel and Wertheimer say health care workers and vaccine makers should be the first to receive the shots, followed by teens and young adults. They based their argument, according to the CBC, on what they call the “life-cycle” principle, under which a person’s value is balanced between how many years he expects to have left and how many years he has lived already.

The Washington Post also noted that in addition to the debate over youth versus age, U.S. government agencies are sparring also over who would be deemed “critical employees” and put higher on the list — posing what the Post called essentially “no-win” dilemmas pitting, for example, air-traffic controllers against border patrol officers.

LONDON
The British House of Lords last week delayed action on a controversial measure that would have allowed doctors to help terminally ill patients commit suicide.

According to the Reuters news agency, the bill, modeled after similar legislation in Oregon, would have permitted physicians to provide life-ending drugs to patients suffering great pain. The patients would have been required to administer the drugs themselves.

The House of Lords put off consideration of the legislation for at least six months, effectively killing the measure for the foreseeable future, according to the Associated Press.

In an emotional seven-hour debate, opponents claimed the measure would destroy fundamental principles related to the sanctity of life and lead to widespread euthanasia. Supporters countered that the bill simply would provide the terminally ill with the right to die in a manner of their own choosing and that safeguards would prevent abuse, the Telegraph reported.

OTTAWA
A proposal to pay government whistle-blowers $1,000 for reporting wrongdoing is a bad idea, according to Canada’s public service integrity officer.

Edward Keyserlingk told a parliamentary committee studying the government’s proposed Accountability Act that cash should not be the main motivation for doing the right thing, according to a report from Ottawa news-radio station CFRA.

“You will hopefully see it as your duty to report wrongdoing rather than doing it because of a reward,” he testified, according to the Toronto Star.

The Accountability Act, designed to clean up government operations, would elevate Keyserlingk to the level of a commissioner who reports directly to Parliament. In testimony last week, Keyserlingk said he largely supports the provisions of the Accountability Act but advocates extending whistle-blowers’ protection from reprisals to the private sector as well as in government, Maclean’s magazine reported.

FRANKFORT, Ky.
A grand jury last week indicted Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher on misdemeanor charges of rewarding political supporters with state jobs.

According to the Associated Press, Fletcher faces several counts of conspiracy, official misconduct, and violating a prohibition against political discrimination.

Through a spokesman, Fletcher, a Republican, denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the indictment was the result of a political vendetta by Democrat attorney general Gregory Stumbo, who is a possible gubernatorial candidate, according to the Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader.

Meanwhile, the indictment has taken on media-event overtones, with the judge in the case telling the Louisville Courier-Journal that he may ask Fletcher to appear in person because of the case’s “importance to the public.” But Fletcher’s staff say they will fight any effort to compel the governor to make a “perp walk.”

Normally, defendants charged with misdemeanors in Kentucky are not required to appear at arraignments.

WASHINGTON
Debate over one of the most politically and ethically divisive issues on the current political agenda was set to begin again this week, as the U.S. Senate prepared to renew consideration of immigration reform.

According to the Agence France-Presse, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) predicted the Senate would devote several full days to consideration of amendments to the measure that must be reconciled with a version passed by the House.

Few issues have highlighted the political fault lines between and within political parties, as well as between the two houses of Congress, as has immigration. The House bill is tougher than the Senate’s, United Press International noted, and would make being an illegal immigrant a crime and stiffen penalties against those who employ them. Passage of the House measure set off a chain of demonstrations across the United States, which in turn seems to have promoted some measure of backlash against pro-immigration groups.

National security also has become a centerpiece of the debate. In an address Monday night, President Bush is expected to propose deploying National Guard troops to tighten security along the U.S.-Mexican border. According to a report from the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune, Bush’s proposal is in part an attempt to mollify critics from his own party who claim that the president’s support of immigration reform could compromise security.

BEIJING
China’s largest Internet search engine company, Baidu.com, announced that it has created an online encyclopedia modeled after the wildly popular Wikipedia — a huge user-edited reference that the Associated Press reports is now censored in China.

The Chinese version, called “Baike” — meaning “one thousand chapters” — is like Wikipedia in that it contains entries written by users, but the main webpage of Baike warns that it will delete content about sex and terrorism, as well as criticism of the government, according to the AP.

The Agence France-Presse reported that the U.S.-based Wikipedia offered a Chinese-language version, which was soaring in popularity until the Chinese government blocked it last year, apparently over references to Taiwan, Tibet, and the banned religious movement Falun Gong.

Chinese censorship of Web content, and the cooperation of several U.S. companies in the censoring effort, has been the focus of simmering ethical debate in recent months, including a congressional hearing during which some legislators blasted U.S. Internet companies for attempting to capitalize on China’s huge market while turning their back on democratic values that originally allowed the firms to prosper.

Xinhua, the Chinese government’s official news agency, said the new site is “modeled after Wikipedia’s free-for-all concept” and “allows all users to contribute to, and edit, its encyclopedia.” There was no mention of censorship or self-censorship in the Xinhua article.

From Harris Interactive®:

“Different professions vary greatly in how much they are trusted to give their clients or patients good advice. According to a recent Harris Poll measuring U.S. adults’ trust in 11 different professions to give advice that is best for them, the professionals trusted completely by the greatest number of adults are doctors (50 percent), dentists (47 percent), and nurses (46 percent).

“At the other end of the list, those with the fewest adults saying they trust them completely are stockbrokers (6 percent), real estate agents (7 percent) and insurance agents (9 percent)….

“While no majority trusts any of the 11 professions completely, large majorities of adults, from 93 percent for doctors to 63 percent for stockbrokers, trust all of them completely or somewhat….

“Other professions included in this survey are:

• “Accountants, trusted completely by 28 percent
• “Lawyers, trusted completely by 18 percent
• “Financial advisors, trusted completely by 16 percent
• “Bankers, trusted completely by 16 percent, and
• “Mechanics, trusted completely by 12 percent

“In general, it seems that professionals who clearly try to sell something, such as stockbrokers, real estate and insurance agents, are less trusted than those who do not.”

“I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everyone to tell me the truth — even though it costs him his job.”

– Samuel Goldwyn (U.S. (Pol.-born) motion picture producer, 1882-1974)