Ireland needs more uniform guidelines and education to help prevent scientific misconduct

IN NORWAY, Jon Sudbø made up patient data relating to cancer. In South Korea, Woo-Suk Hwang’s lab faked a breakthrough in therapeutic cloning. At Bell Labs, German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön duplicated results to boost his publication rate, but could not provide the original data when investigators came looking.

Their names will go down in the history of science for all the wrong reasons – disgraced because of misconduct.

So far, Ireland has not reported any such cases of major scientific fraud that splash across world headlines, damaging reputations and undermining public trust. But with billions of euros being invested in research infrastructure and funding here, experts will argue at a conference in Dublin this week that more awareness is needed around the issues of good research practice, as well as national guidelines for safeguarding research integrity.

People often confuse research ethics and integrity, but they are quite distinct, explains Dr Maura Hiney, head of research policy, evaluation and external relations unit at the Health Research Board. To date, the board has committed about €180 million in research projects here.

“Research ethics is what you do before you even start the research. It’s about getting clearance for take-off. What happens in the air and how you land at the other side is about research integrity,” explains Hiney. “So it relates to how well you carried the research out, stored your samples, collected your data, reported on it, were the right people named on the journal paper – that’s about integrity.”

The cardinal sins revolve around “FFP”, or fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, she notes. But there is also a large grey area of less hangable offences, like shoddy or unsafe lab practices, keeping poor records or naming non-contributing authors on a paper.

Right now, Ireland lacks uniform national guidelines on research integrity – instead, individual institutions tend to draw up their own codes. More coherent safeguards need to be put in place, says Hiney. “We could do nothing and wait for a really serious case to happen, but I think that could do incredible damage, not only to the scientists involved and the host institution, but also to public trust.”

One of the key areas for development is education of early researchers to help counter not only major fraud but also the more mundane erosion of integrity, says Irish Council for Bioethics member Prof Alan Donnelly from the University of Limerick, who represents the Irish Universities Association in a European forum on research integrity.

“Most of the integrity issues aren’t some major league professor who is Nobel Prize territory faking data. It’s the other end of the scale – disputes between a PhD student and their supervisor about who should be named first on a paper, and correct behaviour on authorship,” he says.

The new structured PhD programme in Ireland offers a good opportunity to start informing young researchers about integrity and the importance of keeping good records, says Donnelly. He argues that universities should be driving initiatives to train and police research integrity, rather than Ireland setting up a resource-heavy national agency like the Office for Research Integrity in the US, which can investigate and subpoena researchers suspected of fraud.

We can learn from the Scandinavian countries, which have forged ahead with structures to safeguard research integrity.

In Norway, the National Commission for the Investigation of Scientific Misconduct came into being after the Sudbø incident, explains its director Dr Torkild Vinther. Whistle-blowers are protected by national legislation in Norway, but sometimes there can still be problems for young researchers who pipe up about breaches of integrity, he notes.

Research Integrity – promoting and building trustis on Thursday September 24th at the Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin 2. See www.ria.ie for more details. Admission is free but booking is essential. To register e-mail k.ayton@ria.ie