Scientific misconduct: The ultimate negative career move

Science functions as the engine driving technologic advances because, at its core, science is objective. In fact, objective reporting of experimental data is the guiding principle of scientific investigation. The integrated circuit does, or does not, perform to specifications. The monoclonal antibody does, or does not, recognize an epitope signal over background. A breast cancer drug trial does, or does not, show the drug to confer significant benefit beyond that of placebo. Honesty in experimental design, data collection, and reporting of results is a necessity for scientific objectivity. Some experimental results may only hint at a complete answer — or at worst, appear uninformative. Incremental answers themselves will likely beget even more questions that require answers. This progression is fundamental to the scientific method: each datum, no matter how insignificant, builds upon its predecessors and likewise forms a foundation for further investigation. This is how the Truth, in scientific terms, is discerned. Should research be based on questionable or falsified data generated in the past, then scientific truth—and therefore progress—become suspect. Or so I was taught in graduate school, at our annual Symposia on Scientific Integrity. These symposia were organized in the early 1990s, in the wake of several high-profile cases of scientific misconduct publicized widely in the popular and scientific media. Attendance was “mandatory” for all students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty (somehow, technicians were omitted). I say “mandatory” because I knew of several faculty who at the time never managed to attend; perhaps insulted that our respected institution would even dream that they would fall victim to the temptation of falsifying data, plagiarizing text from an obscure source, or even knowingly misrepresenting authorship on a publication. These egregious offenses to the principles of science were simply things that happened in