Overlooking ethics in the search for objectivity and misconduct in science

The author investigates the relationship between the reliability of scientific data and the ethics of the scientist, demonstrates how attention given to misconduct in the biological sciences adversely affects the broader significance of ethics in this field, and extracts from the applications of ethics in medicine perspectives relevant to the biological sciences. As twentieth-century biological scientists applied increasingly powerful methods to diminish bias and to improve the objectivity of their work, including the replication of experimental findings to verify them, they came to believe that these methods would protect their studies from error and misleading conclusions. This assumption has been shown to be unwarranted because it cannot protect scientists from self-conscious or biased selection in reporting evidence. The canons of scientific objectivity must be grounded in something more fundamental--the canon of ethics. In the end, a commitment to the ethical standard of truthfulness, through an understanding of its meaning to science, is essential to enhance objectivity and diminish bias. Unfortunately, the ethos of concern for scientific misconduct continues to dominate the research-ethics movement. This focus is damaging because it turns the attention to seeking and finding wrong-doers and determining punishment rather than discussing generic issues of doing the right thing, preventing harms, seeking benefits, and understanding the right-making and wrong-making characteristics of actions. The focus on scientific misconduct makes ethical issues appear synonymous with legal issues and the search for ethical understanding synonymous with carrying out an investigation.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)