美国国家公共电台 NPR How A Budget Squeeze Can Lead To Sloppy Science And Even Cheating

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Federal money for science has been shrinking. Under the Trump 1 administration's budget proposal, it could be squeezed even further. And when scientists are under financial pressure, they sometimes cut corners in ways that can hurt us all. NPR's Richard Harris reports.

RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE 2: Mary Allen was a graduate student in a lab at the University of Wisconsin that was facing financial pressure. The year was 2005. One post-doctoral researcher was laid off, and the professor in charge of the lab was scrambling 3 for more funding. But Allen and her fellow grad students saw something that looked fishy 4 in a grant document.

MARY ALLEN: At the time it was discovered, we weren't certain it was falsification. It could have been a mistake.

HARRIS: The grant report didn't accurately 5 describe work that had been previously 6 done in the lab.

ALLEN: And the results sounded slightly better than they really were.

HARRIS: Allen and her fellow graduate students faced a difficult decision.

ALLEN: If it's really falsification, we may not have the ability to keep going in grad school, or they may ask us to go to a different lab and start new projects. Either way, that would be a huge hit to everybody's career.

HARRIS: Long story short, the professor quit and later pleaded guilty to scientific misconduct. Allen liked her professor and thought she was a good scientist. The professor told her students she fudged the report to keep her lab going.

ALLEN: So I think one of the reasons she did it was that she was under so much stress about getting funding for the students and being afraid she wouldn't be able to fund us that she decided 7 tweaking the data a little to make it look better would allow her to get a grant and therefore fund us.

HARRIS: Outright 8 misconduct and fraud are apparently 9 rare in science, says social scientist Brian Martinson at the HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis. But the pressures on scientists appear frequently in many more subtle ways.

BRIAN MARTINSON: If people are working as hard as they can, as many hours as they can physically 10 put in and they're working as smart as they can, then, if they need to get a further edge to try to succeed in their careers, some proportion of people might find themselves making bad decisions and cutting corners.

HARRIS: Martinson has surveyed university scientists and asked them about behaviors he calls undesirable 11, such as whether they skipped some rules and regulations about data handling, patient privacy, record keeping and so on.

MARTINSON: Almost half of the scientists who had responded to our survey said to us that they had engaged in at least one of those activities in the prior three years.

HARRIS: And many said they had violated multiple standards.

MARTINSON: When you get people engaging in that many undesirable practices, you go, this can certainly undermine the quality of the work that's coming out of it and therefore the ability to reproduce it.

HARRIS: And those faulty studies can slow progress as medical scientists work to understand the causes of disease and search for treatments. So it's having an invisible effect on all of us.

MARTINSON: If you've got people who are cutting corners, if you've got people who are doing things that are undermining the quality of research, you have to ask yourself why.

C K GUNSALUS: I think that what we're really talking about here is human nature.

HARRIS: C.K. Gunsalus Gonzales runs the National Center for professional and research ethics 12 at the University of Illinois. She and Martinson were both on a National Academy of Sciences committee on scientific integrity which released a report this week.

GUNSALUS: If you're in an environment that has very high stakes and very low chance of success, those are two of the predictors of environments in which people are going to cheat.

HARRIS: And that's exactly the environment where scientists find themselves today. There are strong career incentives 13 to bend the rules, say, by exaggerating accomplishments 14 in a grant proposal.

GUNSALUS: One of the rules in life is that if you reward bad conduct, you're going to get a lot more bad conduct because even people with Ph.D.s can figure out what you're rewarding and, say, oh, if that's what it takes to get ahead, I can do that.

HARRIS: But if scientists see everyone else playing by the rules, they are more likely to do so as well. That's why Gunsalus, who swoops 15 into troubled academic departments to fix dysfunction, looks to see whether the leaders are setting a good example. If they are, others are likely to follow.

GUNSALUS: People do fundamentally care about the rigor 16 and integrity of research because that's how progress happens. I mean you can't really scam the facts or nature, right?

HARRIS: And it's not just tax dollars and scientific progress at stake. Careers matter, too. Mary Allen says only 3 of the 6 grad students in her up-rooted lab ended up getting Ph.D.s. It took her eight and a half years. She just recently got a job as a research assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder 17. So now she finds herself in the same position as her former professor - on the quest for scarce grant funding.

ALLEN: It was the worst funding NIH had seen, and we've only seen it go downhill. So (laughter) it's even worse than it was before.

HARRIS: And she knows full well what is at stake. Richard Harris, NPR News.