News

Unlike doctors, scientists don't have an ancient moral code like the Hippocratic oath.

But graduate students beginning their careers in medical research at the University of Toronto now have their own solemn ceremony in which they pledge to conduct themselves in an ethical fashion.

Karen Davis, graduate co-ordinator at the Institute of Medical Science, says the new vow stems, in part, from the growing recognition of the potential for academic misconduct, which includes fraud, plagiarism and the shaping of experiments and research papers in ways that help pharmaceutical companies sell more drugs.

"I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship," reads the oath, which was recited for the first time last September by graduate students at the Institute of Medical Science. "I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member."

In a letter published in today's edition of the journal Science, Dr. Davis and her colleagues argue that a student oath should be a standard requirement of graduate programs in life sciences.

At the U of T, she and her colleagues wanted to create an occasion that would make graduate students feel part of an international research community. The oath is the cornerstone for an ethics program that will involve lectures on different aspects of research integrity, workshops, case studies and discussions between students and their mentors.

Fraud is a growing problem in science. A report in this week's edition of the journal Nature found that 9 per cent of the more than 2,000 researchers surveyed had witnessed some form of scientific misconduct in the past three years.

Nature also reported that the Ottawa Health Research Institute suspended postdoctoral fellow Kristin Roovers after learning she had falsified results for experiments she had done while at the University of Pennsylvania.

At Harvard University, a top child psychiatrist is being investigated for allegedly failing to report much of the $1.6-million he earned from drug makers. Joseph Biederman's work is influential and has helped fuel the dramatic increase in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children.

Then there is the dramatic case of South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, who confessed to faking data and published largely fictional papers in the respected journal Science claiming he had cloned human embryos. (Snuppy, the dog he cloned, was real.)

In their letter to Science, Dr. Davis and her colleagues say there is a perception that current students have a more laissez-faire attitude and take plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts and scientific fraud less gravely than previous generations of scientists.

About half the 100 graduate students who start their biomedical research careers at the institute every year have medical degrees and have already taken the Hippocratic oath.

But the other half are basic researchers like Dr. Davis, not medical doctors. She started thinking it was important to give these students a sense they belong to a profession.

"I think students hadn't thought that as scientists they have a responsibility to behave in a certain way," Dr. Davis says.

Similar oaths are now taken by students beginning their research careers at universities in Britain and Taiwan, she says.

She wasn't sure how the students at U of T would react. Would they be cynical? Laugh it off?

The recitation of the oath came at the end of a mandatory orientation session. Each student received a booklet of information and a copy of the oath suitable for framing.

They seemed to take it seriously, Dr. Davis says.