Misconduct and adventure

Every scientist has been there: scrambling for an excuse to get out of the mandatory "responsible conduct in research" seminar. So what if there are cookies? You've heard this stuff a million times before and know it like the back of your hand. You can't waste any more of your precious time. The lab calls. The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is well aware of this attitude towards attempts to educate scientists -- so much so that they mocked it in their recent training film, The Lab.

If The Lab had been released on DVD, the cover would have looked like this
Image: Will Interactive, Inc.

The Lab is a choose-your-own-adventure story about an incident of apparent research misconduct. "It struck me as one of the more innovative approaches to training," says Joe Giffels, a real-life research integrity officer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, who served as consultant on the film. "It's an interactive video game, for goodness sakes!"At the outset, the viewer chooses one of four characters to follow: a grad student, a post doc, a PI, or a research integrity officer. Throughout the story, the viewer makes choices on behalf of this character, affecting the outcome. Make the right choices and misconduct is confronted and dealt with; make the wrong ones, and you're bound for infamy when the misconduct is uncovered years later.The interactive feature is far superior to a lecture for getting the "topic of research integrity really stuck to the minds of researchers," says Loc NguyenKhoa, communications director in ORI's Division of Education and Integrity. It's the difference between being told how to do something, and actually doing it. "That's very passive, where this is very active."The driving force behind the project, NguyenKhoa put a lot of effort into portraying a true-to-life lab, complete with interpersonal complexity. "We really covered all the bases," he says. "The screenwriters knew everything about what we do, everything about the situation."NguyenKhoa accomplished this goal by employing consultants for all aspects of the film. Catherine Sheeley and David McNeill, graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, worked behind the scenes, instructing the writers on the realities of grad student life. They also helped out on set. "We helped them accurately portray science so it doesn't look so much like on TV: bubbling purple liquids, lab coats, smoke, and instant results," says Sheeley.Sheeley and McNeill were even able to convince their PI linkurl:Samer Hatar,;http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/SamerHattar.php a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, to get involved. He was particularly impressed by the project's goal to portray scientists honestly. "It's nice to have this human element to the science," Hatar says. While he made it clear that he didn't want work on the movie to get in the way of his group's research, he granted the film crew access to his lab as a set, leaving behind the day's mess for added realism.Untidy labs aside, it's the manner in which The Lab's characters interact that really sells the story. "A lab is its own dysfunctional family: Everyone has their role, their place, and you have to learn how to manage all those different dynamics," explains Sheeley. The film's depiction of complicated laboratory relationships -- competition, fraternity, hierarchy -- gives the sense that reporting suspected misconduct would be a complicated and difficult decision to make. But maybe a bit of discomfort, even ostracization, is worth it if the alternative is an inescapable association with fraudulent data. The Lab's creators hope to raise awareness of how misconduct actually occurs in the lab and how it's investigated. "By bringing in the personal and interpersonal aspects of lab work in general and an incident like this in particular, it makes people think a little more carefully and differently about the lab they're in and how they might correct themselves," Giffel says.Adam Marcus, a writer who has covered high-profile retractions for Anesthesiology News and co-founder of the blog linkurl:Retraction Watch,;http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/ agrees that misconduct can be halted before it occurs through greater attention from senior researchers. "It's fair to say that this is a culture that could use some looking at," he notes, "and maybe this video could help."Even the consultants learned a thing or two from the making of the film. Sheeley says, "I had my ethics course however many years ago -- but it was a nice refresher."Will you learn something? Watch for yourself -- the entire film is online at linkurl:ORI's website.;http://ori.hhs.gov/TheLab/
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[29th April 2010]*linkurl:Fairness for Fraudsters;http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/article1.jsp?a_day=1&index=1&year=2009&page=13&month=07&o_url=2009/07/1/13/1
[1st July 2009]*linkurl:Does fraud mean career death?;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54921/
[7th August 2008]*linkurl:Related F1000 evaluations;http://f1000.com/search/evaluations?query=fraud
[17th February 2011]