Ethics statements

Hello again! So, after a strenous effort for 2 hours, I was finally able to separate my blog from this course’s blog posts. We will start talking about Ethics statements. What is ethics? Well, you would be like, everyone in academia is an ethical person, right? Otherwise they would be ejected out of academia or their research won’t be valued enough. Now academia has a different standard of ethical research- no plagiarism, no tampering/falsifying/fabricating data or re-using data of any kind and reporting methods not conducted in the studies. The list is exhaustive yet important.

I checked up on the Website of The Office of Research Integrated managed by Department of Health and Human Services and read up on the Viravuth Yin Case Study. To give a background, Dr. Viravuth Yin, the co-founder of heart regeneration biotech Novo Biosciences conducted some studies while being a professor at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory funded by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds, specifically National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grants P20 GM104318 and P20 GM103423.

Over the spa of three published papers and two submitted manuscripts, ORI found he engaged in research misconduct. The ORI investigating team has presented an extremely well-investigated and well-detailed report with substantial observations of misconduct by the researcher. Specifically, the researcher has reused & relabelled data, reported research methods that were not performed and thus falsified results. The researcher has not accepted or denied the charges but agreed with a Voluntery settlement agreement with the following conditions:

• His research will be supervised for a period of two years. Prior to submitting a grant application ,he will submit a plan of supervision to ORI for approval.
• A committee of 2-3 faculty members in the researcher’s area but not his direct supervisors will guide and advise him and review primatry data coming form his studies on a quaterly basis for two years. They will submit regular reports confirming the integrity of the researcher.
• The committee will conduct an advance review of any grant application the researcher submits to the PHS.
• He will not serve on any PHS advisory committee

Looking at the consequences, it seems that researcher is under heavy oversight for two years. An advisory committee will literally babysit him and his lab deriving him of the autonomy academia boasts of. However, this will be regarded as a huge black mark on his future academic positions applications. The level of misconduct conducted has been huge and it will impact the researcher and his guided students for a long time. It is surprising how the researcher was able to ‘pass’ the misconduct and let the research be published in 5 papers despite being peer-reviewed journals. It leads me to question who were the peers? What were their qualifications to be iinvited to the Editorial Board? And how could so many ignore the issues with the papers so many times?