key: cord-0975522-ghmrnttb
authors: Roberts, Lissa L.
title: Contributions to this special issue
date: 2020-12-10
journal: Hist Sci
DOI: 10.1177/0073275320952261
sha: ba432a5869ca49285222eb3a735cdf870dbd253a
doc_id: 975522
cord_uid: ghmrnttb

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Historian Lukas Rieppel suggests we understand accusations of fraud as acts of "boundary work." In his words: "to accuse someone of fraud was to seek their expulsion from the community of knowing subjects, whereas to defend someone against such an accusation was to vouchsafe and uphold the value of their contributions to that community." 1 While considering accusations of scientific misconduct and fraud as serving a social function is a good start, the contributions in this section take the matter further in telling ways.

Buhm Soon Park returns to the so-called "Hwang case" in which Woo Suk Hwang, professor at Seoul National University, was charged in 2006 with fraud in connection with research that he claimed led to the ability to create human stem-cell lines from cloned embryos. 2 The motivating question for Park is why Hwang's close ally and collaborator, University of Pittsburgh professor Gerald Schatten, was judged so differently by administrators and scholars alike; why is this episode not remembered as the "Hwang and Schatten case"? Looking beyond the 'boundary work' performed locally in Seoul and Pittsburgh, Park examines the roles played by research materials and instrumentation. In doing so, he reveals how human embryos "embodied not only physical linkages between humans and non-humans but also moral codes practiced in society. Matters of fraud intersected with matters of ethics in this case." This is not to say, however, that Park wants to argue that materials possess their own agency. As he argues, "Fraud leaves its mark on materials, but material evidence alone never tells the whole story and can be used to limit the range of responsibility." 3 To give explanatory coherence to his analysis, Park coins the term "sociomaterial technology."

Michael Barany takes on the topic of authorship in his contribution, a key issue in matters of research integrity and fraud that encompasses concerns with plagiarism, ghost authorship, and the like. By focusing on the fictional mathematicians Nicolas Bourbaki and E.S. Pondiczery, Barany asks us to reconsider just what it means to be an author in the context of scientific research. This is no small matter, given that conceptions of fraud and integrity largely focus "on the relationships between individual named authors and associated facets of conduct and accountability, a focus often illmatched to the structures and geographies of modern and contemporary research. What Barany shows is just how much boundary work and challenges to it matter in the constitution and management of ethical conduct in a research community. Both authorial integrity (who should be named, in what order, etc.) and fraud, Barany argues, are negotiated products of community dynamics in which various interests, aims and values continually compete. In his contribution, Otto Sibum discusses how research is governed within a scientific community by the underlying presence of a moral economy. Taking the history of precision measurement as his focus, Sibum returns to early twentieth-century debates surrounding the value of the mechanical equivalent of heat. Lorraine Daston argues that the moral economy of precision measurement can be disruptive; it "aims at integrity, sometimes in defiance of the collectivity." 5 As Sibum details in his case study, the twinned integrity of researchers and their measurements involves a historically tenuous balance, as precision measurement aims at furthering knowledge while its practitioners threaten the stability of the community by asserting that previous measurements were insufficiently accurate. At the end of the day, accordingly, both the integrity of researchers and that of their instrumentation are measured by community agreement regarding what constitutes "sufficient accuracy."

Scientists are never only scientists. They are invariably composites of various identitiescitizens, parents, members of a particular socio-economic niche, adherents of a particular political outlook, and so forth. So too do their lives and work unfold in specific historical settings. It therefore makes sense that the power relations, interests, and values that inform these various identities and the contexts in and with which they interact find their way into scientific practices and relations within a scientific community. As we have argued, recognizing that all research is informed by interests and values provides a much more reasonable starting point for the assessment of research integrity and fraud than does continued reference to the ideal of 'value-free' science. One reason for this is that it highlights the ways in which broader relations and commitments inform both the immediate context and content of scientific practice and its assessment. What this suggests is the need to extend the evaluation of research integrity from an examination of individual researchers to include the conduct of the institutions and broader social, economic, cultural and political regimes in which those researchers operate.

Tatjana Buklijas offers a rather sensational case to illustrate how accusations of 'misconduct' and 'fraud' are "informed by competing interests, power dynamics, institutional politics and changing cultures. launched a disciplinary investigation into the conduct of its embryology professor Samuel Leopold Schenk, who argued that women could select the sex of their unborn children through a change of diet. Under scrutiny was not only Schenk's research, but also his publication practices. It was also alleged that his running of a private clinic amounted to quackery, tinged with the implication of sexual misconduct with his female patients. Schenk's demeanor and interest in research topics deemed to be of a delicate, sexually tinged, nature were a good fit with the stereotype image of 'the Jew' that held increasing sway in fin de siècle Vienna: that of an uncouth and lascivious stranger, driven by lust and pecuniary interest, who could not assimilate into civilized society. Buklijas interprets Schenk's censure as the result of two trends. His methods were viewed as a threat to the traditional academic order that professors sought to maintain. And he faced the growing prevalence of anti-Semitism. What brought these two trends together was the growing presence and power of the popular press, which ironically helped spread both news of Schenk's discoveries and anti-Semitic sentiments. Insufficiently 'cultured' and hungry for reward, Schenk found himself caught in a web that was bound to condemn him. The contribution by Mahendra Shahare and Lissa L. Roberts shifts our focus from Europe to India, whose scientific community has actively concerned itself these past years with scientific misconduct, plagiarism, and the rise of predatory journals. Taking a longer view, the authors argue against the claim that the recent introduction of global metrics for scientific management that focus on 'impact' has transformed the nature of scientific misconduct from involving the behavior of individual researchers to involving "groups, networks, or entire institutions." 7 By exploring the roles played by the mix of British imperialism, India's complexly hierarchical society and its regional rivalries in the country's history of scientific development, Shahare and Roberts show that matters of scientific conduct have long involved and can only be understood by examining the behavior of groups, networks, and institutions. Importantly, they do not simply argue that the imperial export of 'western' science included the export of scientific misconduct. While racist attitudes and the imposition of institutional controls certainly framed science under the Raj, they mingled with India's own caste system and regional rivalries to share responsibility for ethically questionable institutionalized practices. But India also housed its own reform movements that -prior to organized efforts in the West -took up the challenges of identifying misconduct and fraud. One is left to wonder whether the clash between contending interests and values in Indian science and society today can be harnessed in a productively democratic way, or whether the country's current regime will succeed in silencing dissenting voices.

Given the notoriety of cases in which research has been co-opted for private profit, it isn't surprising that concerns exist regarding the interests at stake in the relations between research and the commercial world. 8 At the same time, however, researchers are increasingly encouraged by their home institutions and (trans-) national funding organizations to cooperate with industry to stimulate innovation and economic growth. 9 Monitoring research integrity and fraud under such complex and potentially contradictory circumstances entails special challenges, especially given that the research in question can bear on the institutional interests of those responsible for establishing and maintaining the monitoring regime. 10 Along with the need for greater transparency regarding the interests of involved companies, governments, funding and research institutions, evaluating integrity would be enriched by a deeper acquaintance with the history of what we might call the 'research-industrial complex'. 11 As the final two contributions to this special issue indicate, this history cannot simply be told as a story of the perversion of research by pecuniary interests. If the expertise of researchers has long been invaluable to the development and promotion of commercial products, so too has commerce played an important role in developing the very protocols that structure scientific research. Whether regarding the promotion of a product, publication or researcher, evaluation is recognized as a cornerstone of modern science. And whether out of concern for lack of fairness in hiring and retention policies, misconduct in the peer review process, or behind-the-scenes payment for product endorsement, processes of evaluation have come under increased scrutiny. In his contribution, Joris Mercelis explores the history of product evaluation and endorsement through an examination of such practices involving chemists in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Germany. Since at least the late eighteenth century, chemists have occupied a complicated position at the intersection between safeguarding public welfare, promoting knowledge exchange, and generating private profit. 12 Maintaining their reputation as trusted experts has thus been both a professional necessity and a challenge. The public is bound to be thankful for warnings about faulty or dangerous products and tips about superior and beneficial goods. But how trustworthy are they? Mercelis' study illustrates that the perceived integrity of evaluations is invariably entangled with that of the researcher. And the integrity of the researcher is entangled with the specific institutional and professional environments in which they operate, a point that isn't sufficiently recognized by current codes of research conduct. The first introductory essay of this special issue looks at the currently ongoing debate surrounding the efficacy of (hydroxy-) chloroquine for treating A major issue in the debate has to do with how drug trials need to be configured in order to produce valid data. In their contribution, Joseph Gabriel and Bennett Holman return to the United States in the late nineteenth century and present the history whereby clinical drug trials first came to be seen there as the route to establishing a drug's efficacy. Prior to the American Civil War, they explain, the American medical community was ideally organized around a set of ethical norms and what they call "epistemic virtues." Medical practice focused on what worked for the individual patient; a physician's honesty, humility, and selflessness were seen as key in the determination of a treatment's effectiveness. This ruled out reliance on 'patent' medicines whose ingredients were secret; secrecy implied interest and hampered the ability to tailor treatments for individual patients. It also hampered the efforts of 'ethical' drug manufacturers to bring new drugs to market, since profit would be limited by the ideal of open knowledge. This changed in the decades following the Civil War. Competition from European manufacturers, who didn't subscribe to the same ethical and epistemic codes, and a new therapeutic outlook that valued generalized knowledge rooted in laboratory science came to frame the behavior of American physicians and drug manufacturers alike. A drug's efficacy was no longer seen as dependent on a physician's character and treatment of the individual patient, but on the demonstrable results of dependable clinical trials. Importantly, this transformation, whereby patenting ceased to be ethically taboo, was spearheaded by manufacturers who -hoping to expand their markets -claimed that it would "harmonize the interests of science and commerce, so that one may aid the other without jeopardizing the interests of either." 14 In the name of this ideal, however, the stage was now set for new forms of fraud, as scientific evidence could be distorted to maximize profits or suppressed to evade regulatory oversight.

While the articles in this special issue stand on their own as notable contributions to scholarship, they cumulatively serve a number of purposes. Together they illustrate that the study of research integrity and fraud offers rich methodological resources for historians of science. They also testify to the fact that research integrity and fraud cannot be adequately understood or monitored by focusing only on the practices of individual researchers. Rather, their behavior must be appreciated as embedded in and shaped by broader institutional, socio-cultural, and political regimes that frame scientific production by governing matters of retention, reputation, promotion, and profit. Alongside evaluating the conduct of researchers, then, it is crucial that the conduct of academic institutions, policy-making organs, public and private funding agencies, and the like, also be scrutinized. This is not only a matter of identifying the play of interests that direct the choice of favored research topics and activities or the movement of research funding. It is also a matter of uncovering the values that undergird such choices and give meaning to their results.

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

where she held a Personal Chair in Long-Term Development in Science and Technology, and Editor-in-Chief of History of Science. She has authored and edited numerous publications in the history of science and technology, including