PROFESSOR SIR DAVID KING AND PROFESSOR JANET FINCH

2 JULY 2007

  Q1 Chairman: May I welcome our two very distinguished witnesses to this the preliminary meeting of the Science and Technology Committee's look at improving research conduct and preventing scientific fraud? We welcome Professor Sir David King, the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser and Co-Chair of the Council for Science and Technology and Professor Janet Finch, the independent Co-Chair for the Council for Science and Technology and the Vice-Chancellor of Keele University. Welcome to you both. I wonder whether I could start straight away and ask you, Sir David, what you understand by the term "scientific fraud and research misconduct" and are those two things separate in your mind?

  Professor Sir David King: That is a very good question to start me with Chairman. First of all, fraud would be in the deliberate category and misconduct might be not following the rules by accident almost. Having said that, I am aware of the fact that that is not a very clear distinction because when it comes to judging these matters it is really the outcome rather than the intention that would be evaluated. My belief is that at this time we do not have a rigorous procedure in place for determining scientific conduct. So when it comes to fraud, then it would be a matter for the courts to judge on the basis of existing law. Misconduct is an issue where we are perhaps less well placed.

  Q2 Chairman: So you see them as part of the same continuum?

  Professor Sir David King: There is a spectrum; no question it is a continuum and that is why your question is such a difficult one.

  Professor Finch: I certainly would not disagree with that but perhaps the spectrum stretches a little bit further beyond misconduct. The approach to ethical practice in research and high quality ethical practice in research demands that the scientist—and I include all types of science, social sciences as well as natural sciences—or researcher thinks more proactively about what he or she is doing. The ethical code, for example, which I am sure we shall come to, rightly points in the direction of the scientist taking positive steps to make clear to other people, to communicate, the purpose of the science and to make sure that people who may be involved in it or affected by it understand it and that that is the responsibility of scientists as well. So if you stretch out the spectrum, you also come to that more positive proactive requirement which is properly part of the same picture.

  Q3  Chairman: It is important to stress that the Committee is not overly concerned that there is a mass of fraud and misconduct going on out there and it is important to state that. Clearly, the fact that both of you are interested in this area at the very highest level and have taken steps—certainly Sir David you have taken clear steps—to address this problem means that it has come onto your radar and I just wonder why it has come onto your radar?

  Professor Sir David King: I can give a factual answer which is that I attend the G8 Carnegie meetings and at one of these meetings, the issues around conduct of scientists was raised and it was raised in the context that President Chirac had put out a challenge that it should be possible to develop a universal ethical code. I believe by "universal" he meant one that was not subject to a particular political whim or the particular culture of a society, but one that all societies would accept as a universal code. I picked that up as a challenge, but also because I perceived the very real need. We have a number of codes, as a matter of fact we did not quite realise when we set out on this how many codes were already in existence. We discovered the longest code of all was produced by the Royal Society of New Zealand, some 300 pages of it, and we were concerned not to add to this volume of 300-odd codes in existence, but at the same time we recognised that scientific practice over the years has evolved in a way that has served our societies exceptionally well. It is only very occasionally that there is misdemeanour, mispractice, malpractice and so on. That may not be fully understood by the public at large, so there were two elements to drawing up this code. The first was to say that it is possible to distil out of good scientific practice a code of practice that all scientists could accept and buy into and, at the same time, we might use this code to evaluate the work of scientists. What Professor Finch has just said encapsulates what we were looking for. It was going beyond good practice to saying every scientist really needs to look at society's needs and society's sensitivities in terms of their work. It was going beyond just looking, for example, at the publicity around Hwang's work in South Korea. He was a brilliant scientist who was drawn into a malpractice probably because of the enormous pressures he felt within his own country and within the political system to deliver and, very explicitly, to deliver a Nobel Prize. So scientists are put under pressure and it is a question of drawing up a code that determines the boundaries of your reaction.

  Q4  Chairman: I attended a conference recently on fraud in research and we listened to somebody from the US Office of Research Integrity who basically posed the question "What harm does it do?". Obviously the Hwangs of this world are the exception and they stand out, but overall what does it matter if there is a slight change of data or plagiarism or whatever else?

  Professor Finch: I could give a very long answer, but I shall not. There is a specific and a general harm, if you like. In individual cases there may well be considerable harm. I am a social scientist by background and I could give you many illustrations, hypothetical certainly, of where the collection and use of data in social science about people does potentially harm individuals enormously. If people give you data on the understanding that it is going to be confidential and then you reveal it, it may harm their relationships with members of their family, for example.

  Q5  Chairman: Do you regard that as fraud?

  Professor Finch: I regard that as misconduct; I should certainly regard that as misconduct. The more general problem is about trust and this is why the Council for Science and Technology was very pleased when Sir David invited the council to assist him in the development and the dissemination of the code. One of the things that the council has been concerned about, from a variety of angles, is trust in science and in the output of science. We did another study early in our existence, in 2004-05, about public dialogue and public engagement in difficult scientific issues. That is a different angle on the issue of trust, but our society depends so much on the population as a whole, on our fellow citizens being prepared to trust the output of science across a whole range of areas, natural and social sciences, that any example, even very rare examples, of fraud, plagiarism or even misconduct undermines the trust of our fellow citizens in science.

  Q6  Dr Turner: I have in mind what it seems to me is an extremely good example of how unethical behaviour did considerable harm in Britain which was the furore over genetically modified foods; it is still impossible to have an intelligent and adult debate in this country on the virtues of genetic modification. The experiment allegedly carried out by Pusztai, an experiment which I seem to remember was seized on by The Guardian, was not actually an experiment he had even carried out. I am not quite sure how I would classify what was going on there, whether it was fraud, misconduct or sheer damned incompetence, but it certainly did harm. In most areas where we think of ethics, we also think about retribution and we have, as I understand it, no thoughts about what you do to a scientist who deliberately does harm by scientific fraud, misconduct, whatever you like to call it. There does not seem to be any comeback on him, apart from loss of reputation.

  Professor Sir David King: Your example is a good one. We could also raise the issue of MMR vaccines; one very poor publication, which is now understood to have been not maintaining the code of practice that we see here. I would also include the BSE crisis and the loss of trust over that period. One of the phrases that we have introduced here is "Do not knowingly mislead, or allow others to be misled, about scientific matters". This applies in Government as well, to science advisers and how that advice is then portrayed in the public domain. What I am saying there is from the Phillips Commission Report into the BSE crisis that what we must never allow is science advice to be inverted by political decision making. The science advice has to stand there and then decisions are made, but it must be seen to be there. All of these have, in the past, created major problems in our own country. Just a few of these problems have arisen but they have created quite a big issue, particularly around the area of trust. What we need to do to regain trust is to say we have now a code of practice and we expect all scientists to follow that. In the first instance we do not have, however, the retribution that Dr Turner is referring to.

  Chairman: If you take Wakefield's research in MMR, should not the scientific community itself have actually picked that up and challenged it and thrown it out the other side? Do you think that the scientific community is sufficiently robust to be able to police itself in terms of rooting out malpractice, fraud, plagiarism or whatever you want to call it?

  Q7  Dr Iddon: Of course, your professional organisation, and mine too, the Royal Society of Chemistry and others have professional codes of conduct already and disciplinary procedures. Do you think they use them enough?

  Professor Sir David King: Let me take them as two questions.

  Q8  Chairman: The fundamental question is: is the scientific community itself sufficiently robust to be able to root out anything from simple malpractice right through to serious fraud?

  Professor Sir David King: What the scientific community did there, as it has done for example with Richard Lindzen, who is an atmospheric scientist who is a global warming naysayer, in both cases the scientific community has responded by doing research. The best way to respond to that sort of situation is to do some more research and find out whether there is actually any content in the statement being made. In the case of Wakefield, the best piece of research I could refer to is the Danish study of every child born over a ten-year period in Denmark, of whom 20% did not have the MMR vaccine, the rest did and the incidence of autism was recorded in Denmark and it was statistically identical in the two cohorts. That is the information every mother in Britain would want to have known, and every father if I may say so, in making that decision about whether or not your child gets the MMR vaccine. According to the Danish study, and a very large number of kids were looked at, there is not going to be any statistical difference in the possibility of your child becoming autistic. That is how the scientists responded, but there is another issue behind your question: the media did not pick up on the scientists' response. So the scientific community responded by rejecting the hypothesis in the way that it normally does, but by this time the media had the bit between their teeth and showed very little interest in what was now showing that the story that was selling front pages had no validity at all.

  Q9  Chairman: So you feel that peer review is effective?

  Professor Sir David King: The peer review process on the whole is effective. However, the publication of the Pusztai paper and the publication of the Wakefield paper indicate that there can be major problems there. Neither paper should have been published.

  Q10  Chairman: The other thing that we have picked up is the issue of pressure on scientists to deliver and particularly to deliver in terms of publications. Do you feel that that pressure to deliver publications, to get the next round of grants, is so severe now that it actually encourages shortcuts or malpractice?

  Professor Finch: There are various pressures on scientists and quite clearly that is true. What has been happening over the last few years—and I can speak most knowledgeably about the social science dimensions—is that various bits of the spectrum that go to make up the research community and the research process have been increasingly aware of the need to, in a sense, produce countervailing pressures there. Dr Iddon has already referred to the professional and learned societies with their codes of practice. The research councils also have codes of practice and the research funding bodies are key players here. The ESRC for example, I know from personal experience, requires the universities who accept the grant to ensure that they have got in place appropriate codes of practice which they require their employees to follow. You start to form a chain of responsibility there, where the funders are requiring the employers who accept the grants and employ the scientists to ensure that those ethical codes are there and to attest to that before the funding is accepted. There are several players in this game here; it is not purely scientists and the peer review system that are required to ensure that the basis of trust is really secure. I am sure that more can be done to consolidate this system, but I am conscious that a number of players are already acutely aware and working on their bits of the system, if you like.

  Professor Sir David King: In response to your question on pressures on scientists, there is another very important pressure. It can be revealed that you have done something to your data when somebody else repeats the experiment and finds a different result. I can give you an example of a student at Cambridge who had his PhD subsequently withdrawn by the university after an investigation was carried out and the reason for this was that his work could not be reproduced and then it was shown that it could not have happened. In other words, the result as published in the journal could not have been correct and had to have been achieved by cheating. The result is that that person, although by all accounts a brilliant young person, could never practice as a scientist again. What I am saying really is that there are systems in place to create the pressures on people to be absolutely careful and honest about their work. Despite this, there are occasional misdemeanours because of the pressures you are referring to. Why did this young man I have just described come to do this? I think it was those pressures. He was seen to be a very bright young person and yet his PhD work was not working out the way his supervisor might have expected it to. All sorts of pressures come to bear on young people to be seen to be performing exceptionally well. What we need to do is counter those pressures as well as set out a code.

  Chairman: If we have time, I shall come back to other pressures on that.

  Q11  Chris Mole: You started to touch on who has responsibility in this area and talked about the self-policing role in the scientific community, but what is Government's role in defining and policing research ethics? Are they interested only in publicly funded research or do you think they have a bigger role?

  Professor Sir David King: I believe they have a bigger role so I can answer first of all as the Government Chief Scientific Adviser that of course we have thousands of scientists working in Government. My intention first of all was to roll this code out for all government scientists. This is the Government Chief Scientific Adviser's code for practising scientists in Government. In terms of the publicly funded scientific community, there are the universities. They are autonomous bodies however and the roll-out there would require people like Janet Finch to accept that it was needed, to take it to the universities themselves and for them to decide whether to accept it. I am very keen that that happens. The code is also written in a form that should be perfectly acceptable within the private sector, so there is nothing in the code that would deviate from what is required of good practice in the private sector as well. Frankly I am quite ambitious for the code. I would like to see it rolled out in all of our communities. Dr Iddon mentioned learned societies setting up their own codes. This is still called a universal code, picking up on Chirac's original phrase, but I see it as universal to all parts of science and different learned societies might then have their own codes sitting underneath this umbrella. The Royal Academy of Engineers has just come out with a code which refers directly to rigour, respect and responsibility, to this code that I have set out and that is a good practice. By the way, I referred to the length of the New Zealand code. This was one reason why we decided on a seven bullet point code. Our code is short; it is a code that we believe people can memorise and therefore apply in their everyday practice.

  Professor Finch: Sir David has mentioned universities, so I speak now as a vice-chancellor rather than as a chair of the Council for Science and Technology. Universities are very aware of their responsibilities here. My university certainly has its own code of practice which is consistent with this and we revised it again recently. That would be true of every university. There are particular issues in relation to research that bears on medicine and health. There are further requirements there of research governance which are very stringent and Universities UK have worked with other funding bodies to support the establishment of the UK Panel for Research Integrity in Health and Biomedicine, which is a body which has three-year funding to develop a pilot project to support universities in their responsibility in this regard. It is particularly important that we have that support. So there are particular issues in relation to health and medical research from a university angle, but the code covers all aspects of science and all universities will have such a code or be developing one.

  Q12  Chris Mole: In terms of the universities, do you think they have good practice in teaching the ethical principles of research and do they then handle allegations of misconduct well when they come to them?

  Professor Finch: The consultation that the Council for Science and Technology led on the draft code, Rigour, Respect and Responsibility, had a good response and there were two key messages coming back from the response, one of which was that having such a code is particularly important in relation to the training of new and young scientists. Actually the message came back as well that it has some value in relation to schools, given that the A-level and even the GCSE curriculum now emphasise much more not only training in scientific techniques but also in the understanding of science and the implications of science for society as a whole. I do not have any expertise in that, but it is an interesting area and that message came through the consultation. Similarly in the consultation the message came through very clearly that such codes are extremely important in the training of both undergraduates, because we have to train all our undergraduates to some extent in understanding scientific method and the implications of science, but also obviously there is a very special responsibility in training postgraduate research students who are doing their first real projects. Universities do have a very particular responsibility here and that was widely acknowledged by the community in its response to the consultation on this code.

  Q13  Chris Mole: Do we have any views about the value of trying to teach it in schools, given that a lot of the kids that might be learning science might not go on to science degrees? Is it too early to introduce the code?

  Professor Finch: No, it is not too early; it absolutely is not too early. I do not have any direct responsibilities in relation to schools, but it cannot start too early. That is the way of developing not only good scientific practice in the future but much better and widespread understanding of what science is, how it is conducted. Then we come back to the basis of trust of the population as a whole in the outcome of science.

  Q14  Chris Mole: Primary science starts with understanding control of samples and experiments and things, so I imagine you can never start too young. Have you got a view on the significance of the establishment of the Committee on Publication Ethics in combating research misconduct, COPE?

  Professor Sir David King: It is a very good thing to investigate, but my views do not go beyond that.

  Q15  Chris Mole: They have a form of words not dissimilar to the code, so you are happy that it is complementary.

  Professor Sir David King: It is complementary. Just let me add that I completely agree with Janet Finch about the need to include this code in teaching in schools. A big part of this is about public confidence and the public are all at school at some point and they need to know that they have to expect this form of behaviour from the scientific community, even if they are not becoming scientists.

  Q16  Chris Mole: Just come back to the Committee on Publication Ethics. Professor King, you said earlier on in reference to a couple of the examples that you were discussing with the Chairman, that they should never have been published. Is it something like COPE that is going to help prevent that in the future?

  Professor Sir David King: Frankly, yes it will, but what actually will help to prevent that in the future is the adverse publicity drawn around those papers after the event. I know the damage is done but nevertheless, for example the adverse publicity around Hwang in particular, but there have been other misdemeanours, is something that goes down as a lesson learnt for the scientific community. It becomes very, very clear that these misdemeanours become highly publicised. There is real value in that.

  Q17  Chris Mole: Should the universal code or COPE's equivalent be saying something to our media about picking up stuff that has not been properly peer reviewed?

  Professor Sir David King: Absolutely; yes. The features of the code in terms of the public are: scientists to behave in such a way as to ensure public confidence; scientists to behave in such a way as to engage with the public on the nature of the work that you are doing; avoid public distrust. This is the Frankenstein fear: avoid public distrust. This applies equally to the media. In a scientific discourse, whether it is on GM or on MMR, it behoves proper behaviour from the media if we are going to have responsibility from that source. Then, finally, trust in scientific practice. We must understand what scientific practice is and how it operates, so if there is one person who the media can find—and here of course Wakefield is the classic example—amongst the entire scientific community taking a viewpoint, we would very much like the media to understand that that is not quite properly represented if each are given 50/50 coverage.

  Q18  Chairman: You will pardon me for just saying that in some ways you sound a little complacent and that is not like you because you are always very, very challenging in the way in which you approach things. If you look at BBSRC, they admitted that in 2004 25% of their students admitted some form of plagiarism and 16% of them admitted multiple offences. From one research council that is quite a significant number of students who are actually involved in some form of malpractice which goes against your code. I just wondered whether you regard plagiarism as an inevitable consequence of being able to access data very, very quickly. If so, just moving on to the issue of the commercial sector or the private sector where Professor Finch said you wanted the code to actually infiltrate the private sector as well, how concerned are you that private sector companies are using our universities to verify data without giving the universities full access to the data, as with the case we heard in Sheffield, when we were looking at scientific advice to Government? I just wonder whether there is more underneath the iceberg than perhaps we are looking at. Are you concerned about that?

  Professor Sir David King: I am ashamed that for the first time ever you have accused me of complacency. Let me say that I do not intend to come across as complacent on this issue. What I do want to say is that the serious misdemeanours that we have been discussing, the Wakefield type of misdemeanour, is a very rare event and yet it can have a major impact and it can have a major impact in two ways: we might have seen a massive measles outbreak with children dying; secondly, trust of the public in what science is doing was threatened. The misdemeanours you referred to do come under our category of rigour, honesty and integrity. The actual words are "Be alert to the ways in which research derives from and affects the work of other people". In other words plagiarism is certainly one of the things that we are very clear about. The figure that you quote from the BBSRC is very disturbing and quite obviously we have a lot of work to do; I do not want to suggest we do not. In terms of industry using universities to verify data where they have given insufficient information to the universities that is just the complete opposite of the kind of behaviour that we need to get. It rather fits into the category of the Phillips Commission Report on the BSE crisis. We do not want scientists ever to be put in the position of actually saying the opposite of what a true scientific analysis would say. If they have not been given all the information, they cannot possibly give a full evaluation. So "Do not knowingly mislead, or allow others to be misled" applies to the industrialists who are leading the universities into that position as much as it applies to university work.

  Q19  Chairman: But huge amounts of money come into the universities in order to verify research which has been done, to give it a stamp of approval because our universities are held in such high esteem. I just wonder how we actually crack that one really or do you just simply depend on the code and the university's own code of ethics and the individual scientist's professional body's code of ethics to be able to deal with that? Are you happy that the processes that are in place will in fact stamp all that out?

  Professor Sir David King: No, I will not be happy until it is all stamped out, in other words, the proof is going to be in the outcome. As long as there are reports of these things happening, we need to be tightening up this, so I very much welcome the work of this Committee and any other attention that can be focused on this area of work.

  Professor Finch: The statistic that you have quoted from BBSRC was for research students and everybody who teaches research students would accept that that is the point at which they have to learn how to use other people's work properly. Plagiarism is using other people's work improperly, but they ought to be using other people's work, so, although I certainly would not want to be in any way complacent about that, I would be much more worried if it were 25% of experienced scientists.