Fraude Cientifico

viewpoint viewpoint
Fraud: causes and culprits as perceived by science and the media
Institutional changes, rather than individual motivations, encourage misconduct Martina Franzen, Simone Rödder & Peter Weingart

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lmost 2 years after Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues published groundbreaking work on the creation of human embryonic stem-cell lines, an investigation committee from SeoulNational University, South Korea, announced that much of the research had been fabricated. Human embryos had not been cloned and stem-cell lines had not been derived from patient-specific somatic cells. Science retracted the two articles concerned, and Hwang and several members of his research team were later indicted on charges of fraud, embezzlement of research funds and violations of bioethical laws.In the aftermath of this case, many scientists expressed concerns that the public image of science, and of stem-cell research in particular, had been tarnished. “Scientists fear that the episode will damage not only public perceptions of stem-cell research, but science’s image as a whole” (Check & Cyranoski, 2005). Others were more optimistic and hoped that the case would “serve as an antidote tothe ‘tabloidization’ of stem-cell research and … make the public conscious of the fact that the science is difficult” (Snyder & Loring, 2006). Some simply regarded the race as open again: “At one point, the research community thought that we might have, in Hwang, a technical virtuoso. Now we recognize that we all remain on an equal footing” (Snyder & Loring, 2006). The Hwang case provides a goodexample of how the scientific community and the mass media deal with fraudulent behaviour in science. Both give the impression that misconduct is committed mainly by

individuals who have lost—or never had—a scientific ethos, while reassuring the public that fraudulent scientists are ultimately caught and punished. Indeed, agencies dealing with cases of scientific misconduct, such as the USOffice of Research Integrity (ORI) in Rockville, Maryland, and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Bonn, also proceed on the assumption that misconduct is a problem at the level of the individual. Instead, we argue here that there are other factors—emanating from institutional changes within science (Weingart, 2001)—that favour misconduct, and might make it more widespread than is suggested by thescientific community and the media. The public discussion of scientific fraud might act to strengthen the scientific ethos, whereas the underlying conditions that

encourage misconduct work continuously to erode it.

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raud in science is defined by the intention to deceive as compared to error or carelessness, and is commonly classified into three categories: fabrication, falsification orplagiarism (FFP). When investigating cases of suspected scientific misconduct, the DFG usually speaks of dishonesty rather than intentional fraud. This wider definition allows all forms of misconduct to be separated from carelessness and honest mistakes. It is difficult to compare the incidence of fraud in the USA and Germany, owing to different definitions of misconduct. However, both the ORI andthe DFG report no significant rise in the number of fraud cases in the
EMBO reports VOL 8 | NO 1 | 2007 3

©2007 EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ORGANIZATION

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CHARACTERISTICS OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH THAT MIGHT ENCOURAGE MISCONDUCT
In biomedical research, scrutiny—usually by peer review—is complicated by the specificities of biological material. It is not easy to replicateresults from another research group without also obtaining the same materials, such as specific cell cultures. More generally, biomedical research depends to a large extent on experimental conditions and researchers’ skills; therefore, the methods and techniques developed and refined in one laboratory might be difficult to adopt elsewhere. In fact, exact reproducibility of individual experiments is...