Ron makes an excellent point. Many institutions devote far more energy to limiting risk than to doing the right thing. This leads administrators to a frightening, but logical conclusion: The less science we do, the less chance of our doing something that could invite a penalty on the university. This translates into rules intended to head off bad behavior, but which in fact make it more difficult to do honest science, and increase the administrative burden (our IT group has already made great strides in this direction--if you can't connect to the network, then you can't use it to violate HIPAA!). So I agree that we should be cautious about "improvements." Pat
On 6 Apr 2012, at 12:23 PM, Ronald E Stenkamp wrote: > Dear John, > > Your points are well taken and they're consistent with policies and practices > in the US as well. > > I wonder about the nature of the employer's responsibility though. I sit on > some university committees, and the impression I get is that much of the > time, the employers are interested in reducing their legal liabilities, not > protecting the integrity of science. The end result is the same though in > that the employers get involved and oversee the handling of scientific > misconduct. > > What is unclear to me is whether the system for dealing with misconduct is > broken. It seems to work pretty well from my viewpoint. No system is > perfect for identifying fraud, errors, etc, and I understand the idea that > improvements might be possible. However, too many "improvements" might break > the system as well. > > Ron > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick J. Loll, Ph. D. Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Director, Biochemistry Graduate Program Drexel University College of Medicine Room 10-102 New College Building 245 N. 15th St., Mailstop 497 Philadelphia, PA 19102-1192 USA (215) 762-7706 pat.l...@drexelmed.edu
