teries of nature -- not by the ingenuity of another human brain.” [Houdini, 18741926]
Intellectual honesty must be a goal of every scientist. As we saw in Chapter 6, people tend to ignore evidence that diverges from expectations. We must fight this tendency; continued awareness and evaluation of possible personal biases is the best weapon. Intellectual honesty requires that we remain alert to conflicts of interest, whenever we review proposals and manuscripts, and wherever objectivity and personal advancement clash. Intellectual honesty requires that we face weaknesses as well as strengths of data, hypotheses, and interpretations, without regard for their origin, invested effort, or potential impact on our beliefs.
“Thou shalt not steal,” and the currency of scientists is not money or objects but ideas. Intellectual plagiarism, the attempt to take credit for the ideas of others, is clearly unacceptable, but its boundaries are indefinite. Most scientists feel that:
• It is not OK to initiate a research project inspired by communications from another scientist in a letter, conversation, lab visit, or preprint, unless the other scientist has specifically encouraged you to do so. Ask permission, but weigh the other’s response to decide whether they really favor your jumping in or they simply feel obliged to say yes.
• It is OK to initiate a research project inspired by another scientist in a scientific talk for which abstracts are published. One should refrain from publishing a manuscript on this project, however, until the other scientist has published.
• It is not OK to let your research plans be affected in any way by either a proposal or a manuscript that you have been sent for review.
• It is OK to jump into a research area as soon as it has been published. The authors have no right to keep the field to themselves, and they do have a head start.
• When mentioning a previously published idea in a publication, reference the originator unless the idea has become common knowledge.
Intellectual plagiarism is more often suspected than deliberately practiced. Ideas frequently stem from interactions with others. In such cases, the combination of two perspectives deserves credit for development of the idea, not the person who first verbalizes it. Perhaps the idea is not even verbalized during the discussion, yet one of the individuals later ‘realizes’ the idea when solitarily thinking about the subject. Menard [1986], reviewing the formative days of the geological paradigm of plate tectonics, found that simultaneous ‘independent’ discoveries were remarkably common.
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Publication
“To study, to finish, to publish.” [Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790]
Communication of results, particularly via publication, is an essential part of a scientist’s life. I could describe the highly ritualized design of most modern publications: introduction, experimental techniques, observations, and conclusions. I am more intrigued, however, by the contrast between publications, which are dry and rational, and publication experiences, which can be heavily emotionladen. Let us examine briefly the publication experiences of some of our greatest scientific forebears: Euclid, da Vinci, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein.
