PEDIATRICS Vol. 84 No. 2 August 1989, pp. 342
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CLASH OF CULTURES AT MEETING ON MISCONDUCT

J. F. L. MD

If there was ever any doubt about how very different the cultures of Capitol Hill and science can be, a meeting last week at Cold Spring Harbor on "the ethos of scientific research" should settle the question: The two groups can be worlds apart. They continue to amaze each other by having the audacity to know what's best.

The closed meeting was an attempt to get representatives of the two warring camps to sit in the same room and discuss what to do about the highly emotional topic of scientific misconduct and fraud....

The staffers told the scientists that Congress was damn serious about its role as a fiduciary watchdog. They let the scientists know that if the universities and the NIH fail to address allegations of misconduct, then Congress will consider fixing the situation with legislation. Indeed, at the end of the last session of Congress, there was legislation circulating that would have erected something like an office of scientific integrity....

The suggestion that fraud was a widespread problem in need of legislative remedy seemed to many in the audience to be "outlandish"....

Though most of the scientists contend that there is not an explosion of fraud, they agree there is a problem, perhaps as Walter Gilbert of Harvard University, says: "a small but very real problem." There was general agreement that Congress should not be in the business of scrutinizing scientific papers. Rather the universities and NIH should do the job....