• Question: Have you ever seen another scientist do something inhuman and/or just wrong? Did they get away with it?

    Asked by anon-231036 to Tom, Steven, Jessica, Haafizah, Clio, Bruno Silvester on 14 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Jessica Mitchell

      Jessica Mitchell answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      That is an important question to ask. Everyone makes mistakes and gets things wrong so it is important to help people if this happens. I have made mistakes in the lab before and in my mathematical analyses and have had to go back, ask for help and change things. This is annoying but you need to make sure things are correct especially as scientists will share their findings/results with others.

      I have never seen any scientist do anything inhumane and I would be very concerned if that happened in the future. Scientists have strict guidelines to follow to keep animals, people and the environment safe and anyone breaking these rules needs to change their attitude.

    • Photo: Bruno Silvester Lopes

      Bruno Silvester Lopes answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Personally I have never seen anything inhumane work by a scientist but I have come across someone who was very well renowned for the work they did and published in very prestigious journals but falsified results. The person was removed from the post and can no longer practice as a scientist.

    • Photo: Tom Snelling

      Tom Snelling answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Faking data is becoming a big problem, and there are now people (called research integrity officers) who work full time to look for faked data. It is a problem in all universities. It is not widespread but in a big university there is always at least once case every couple of years.

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