Foreword Teaching Responsible Conduct Responsibly
Like Frank Macrina, the author of this outstanding textbook, we have been teaching students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff about the responsible conduct of research (RCR) for many years, and we welcome the opportunity to share some of what we have learned during that time. Neither this short essay nor the book itself is amanual on the responsible conduct of research. You can find such manuals—many professional societies have them, and federal agencies do, too. And, yes, Dr. Macrina will introduce you to some rules and regulations, generally agreed-upon standards, and even some laws. But mostly you will be given the opportunity tothink—to think about what it means to act responsibly.
There are several reasons for focusing on thinking rather than simply memorizing rules. First, active engagement is critical to promoting real understanding. Second, acceptable standards often differ with the research culture and thus can vary with geography, discipline, and department and even among individual laboratories. Third, important issues are always evolving. Ask yourself, which issues of significance to research today were not even considerations a generation ago? Consider, for example, that the use of Photoshop® to “enhance” a figure, or the cutting and pasting of text found on the Internet, could not have become issues until those tools became available in the early 1990s. Which other issues have recently emerged? And what do you imagine will be the issues that will confront you a decade from now? Will it be the automatic genetic profiling of each individual at birth? The ability of one person to monitor the thought processes of another?
Before you go any further, we invite you to take a moment to make a list of whatyou think are the central issues in RCR and then see how we and Dr. Macrina do. Did we miss some issues you think are important? If so, raise the issues among your colleagues. And write to the author—you may play an important part in the development of the next edition!
In this brief Foreword we deal with two issues. We begin by considering how instruction might best be provided. We then analyze some of the federal and institutional guidelines that have played an important role in promoting the introduction of RCR training into academic programs, suggesting that they are an important driving force for ethics education but also that they in part have led to some of its most serious—and contentious—problems.
Teaching RCR: how, who, and when?
We all learned at an early age to pay more attention to what peopledo than what theysay. One of our favorite cartoons is by Edward Argo. It portrays a young child standing in the corner facing the wall and saying to his stuffed animal friend, “The same people who told me the stork brought me are making me stand here for lying.” You can substitute your own favorite example of the discrepancy between words and actions in lecture halls and the workplace. This is why the “how” of RCR instruction is so much more important than the precise details of what is included in the curriculum.
How to teach? The most common approach for teaching most things, including RCR, is by lecturing. And certainly that can be a useful method for delivering large amounts of material to sizeable groups of individuals. But all too often lectures quickly devolve into an exercise in dictation, providing little opportunity for engagement with
