Daniel BuenoThe case of a sabotaged scientific experiment, whose victim was a post-doctoral student at Yale University, has revived the debate surrounding the definition of scientific misconduct, usually construed to encompass only fabrication, data falsification, and plagiarism. Magdalena Koziol had just started her research period at Yale’s developmental biology lab in 2011, when all the transgenic fish she was using suddenly died. Her suspicions prompted her to redo the experiment, this time taking the precaution of separating the fish into two groups, one identified with her initials, MK, and the other not. Only the labeled fish died. Koziol filed a complaint with the university, and a camera was installed in the lab. The images showed another post-doc, Polloneal Jymmiel Ocbina, poisoning the fish with ethanol. A suit has been filed against Ocbina, who left Yale after he was caught.
Was this a case of scientific misconduct or an act of vandalism, comparable to destroying public property? The debate is not new. In the 1990s, the discussion in the United States was whether federal law should define research misconduct to include cases of laboratory sabotage and sexual assault within the walls of academe. At the time, the decision was made to retain the narrower definition, based on the rationale that misdeeds not directly linked to scientific practice could be handled through other existing mechanisms. In the opinion of Lisa Rasmussen, professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Yale incident constitutes misconduct because it involves tampering with research results. Speaking to the journal Science, the professor cited a similar case that was analyzed in 2011 by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI): post-doctoral student Vipul Bhrigu confessed to killing the cultured cells of a colleague at the University of Michigan. Ruling that this act of vandalism had adulterated research records, the ORI categorized the case as falsification. Bhrigu was banned from receiving funds from U.S. government agencies for three years.
The Yale incident may have other repercussions. In addition to taking the saboteur to court, Koziol is also suing the university and her former supervisor, Antonio Giraldez. She claims Giraldez prohibited her from talking about the incident, refused to list her as co-author of an article even though she had taken part in its research, and declined to write a letter explaining the situation to the institution that had given her a grant, so she could justify her lack of research data. Koziol left Yale in March 2013 and returned to Cambridge University in Britain, where she had done her doctoral work, at the laboratory of John Gurdon, 2012 Nobel laureate in medicine.
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