Keeping ethics relevant

I first taught an undergraduate course on ethics about 20 years ago. Being relatively fresh from a postdoctoral research position, I focused on issues I found most interesting: publication practices, peer review, and data analysis.

As I later read comments on course evaluation forms, I found that several students questioned the relevance of much of my chosen subject matter. I had obviously missed the mark for students planning to go into industry or high-school teaching.

Although establishing those topics’ relevance to industry and to high-school physics teachers is possible, I had not done so. Instead, I had assumed that all of my students were on the same career trajectory toward academic research as I had been. Ever since then, I have been especially sensitive to the need to know my audience when I address ethics.

In my experience, most physicists place a high priority on relevance when it comes to ethics. For a time, that emphasis on relevance arose, in part, because it gave some members of the community a sense of immunity from certain ethical problems: Given the objective nature of data collection in physics, fraud could not be perpetrated for long before being discovered, and hence no rational physicist would attempt it.

Recent high-profile cases of fraud suggest that fraud is more relevant to the physical sciences than those community members had thought. The lesson of episodes like the Schön affair of 2002 is that even though fraud in high-profile areas will be discovered, the physics community may waste a lot of resources while the fraud is being perpetrated.

The recently reauthorized America COMPETES Act requires that all students and postdocs supported by NSF grants be given some formal training in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). This requirement was inserted into the act at the request of NSF’s inspector general because the number of misconduct investigations involving NSF funding had increased. Unless the physics community recognizes the value of RCR education, there is a real danger that physicists will regard the required RCR education as an irrelevant bureaucratic exercise.

Not just for biologists and medical researchers

In 2000 the University of Miami and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle joined forces to create the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI ). Aimed originally at the biomedical sciences, the online initiative has produced a set of modules designed to help researchers comply with NSF’s RCR education requirements. With a reported 1100 institutions participating in CITI, yours may well be one that uses the modules.

That a module set dedicated to the physical sciences exists is promising. However, the modules clearly reveal their origins in the life sciences. For instance, the Data Management and Acquisition module contains numerous references to human-subjects-related issues, such as maintaining confidentiality of sensitive information and working with institutional review boards. Those issues are relevant to physics education research, but the module presents them in a biomedical context. Furthermore, discussions of similar types of data being collected independently by multiple collaborators evoke images of social or medical research, not of a typical laboratory experiment in physics.

Whereas physics students who are interested in ethics will likely find CITI’s physical sciences modules interesting and thought provoking, they may not find what they really need: the professional and ethical expectations of the physics community.

RCR education should not be considered complete without a reference to established standards in one’s own field, yet at many universities, such specific material is missing. An essential element of RCR education in physics is reading and understanding the relevant statements adopted by the American Physical Society, such as the APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct.

Physics Today is also a rich source of material on ethics. Over the years, the magazine has published articles, opinion pieces, and letters that address

• mentor–mentee relationships ,
• misconduct ,
• publication issues , and
• the impact of physics research on society at large .

Having students read a few of these articles is likely to generate a more lasting impression than having them read generic material on ethics in science. If physics-related reading material were discussed in the context of even one meeting in a weekly brown-bag seminar series, many of the key and fundamental issues related to RCR could be addressed effectively and efficiently.

The issues related to RCR in physics have enough depth and complexity for a full course of study. Every time I teach my one-credit-hour course, I am pained to recognize the number of readings I cannot squeeze in and the number of significant cases I do not have time to discuss in any detail. There is no shortage of physics-specific material.

Individual physics departments should insist that their institution’s NSF RCR policy be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of physicists—or of any other scientific discipline. NSF has given the academic community considerable flexibility to design RCR programs that comply with its requirements. We should take advantage of that flexibility to ensure that the time our students spend on RCR education is productive.

Marshall Thomsen is a member of the department of physics and astronomy at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. Besides ethics, his interests include laser–solid interactions and thermodynamics.