Scientific misconduct

The news on research misconduct is coming in hard and fast. A Bradford University professor was reportedly caught having published content that he plagiarized from Indian academics.  Germany had its fair share of significant scandals fairly recently. Retraction Watch reported on Professor Joachim Boldt who had some 90 or so papers retracted because they involved academic misconduct of some kind or other. The country defense minister was forced to resign (mostly because of outrage among the conservative middle classes and widespread anger among academics) because his doctoral thesis basically was a patchwork of stuff he copied elsewhere. Der Spiegel weekly magazine reports that the head of sport medicine at Freiburg University is currently under investigation by university authorities for having plagiarized parts of his habilitation (a German kinda second doctorate that you need if you wish to go for professorial jobs - a waste of time by any stretch of the imagination, but that's a story for another day). As yet unsubstantiated rumors have it that he delayed his PhD student's thesis defence so that he'd be able to publish his habilitation first. The university also investigates claims that said professor's wife, in order to speed up her doctoral thesis defense misappropriated content from doctoral theses her husband supervised for her own thesis.

At Bioethics, a journal that I am associated with as an Editor, we had to face - in this year alone - two plagiarism cases, each time involving stuff we published being plagiarized elsewhere. One paper has since been retracted by BMC Medical Ethics, an Open Access electronic publication operated by Springer Publishing. The retraction did not occur until significant pressure was exerted on the reluctant publisher. In case of doubt, strangely, publishers and editors seem quite happy to cover their authors' tracks and opt for Errata as opposed to retractions, the dreadful word 'plagiarism' is avoided at nearly all cost by publishers and editors. It's unclear to me whether that is due to legal reasons as opposed to lack of insight on the relevant editors' part. The other plagiarism claim is still investigated. When you realize that we publish only between 55 and 65 manuscripts in any given year, that's quite a bad start into 2011.

In Britain the conservative paper The Telegraph reports the results of a nationwide survey suggesting that some institutions had to face down hundreds of cheating students in just one year. You'll be pleased to know that the supposedly best universities in the country, Oxford and Cambridge (where likely the pressure to perform is highest) reported in 2009/2010 12 and 1 instances respectively of cheating amongst their students. I guess, the good news is that once you've been admitted there you don't have to worry too much about getting caught while you engage in academic misconduct. Their  enforcement of academic standards is likely to be pretty lax indeed. Cambridge having caught one student cheating in said academic year seems to be the perfect place to study these days. I recommend the league table to you in case you consider enrolling in places where you stand a fair chance at getting away with cheating because nobody seems to bother checking too carefully. Go for those universities that report close to no students cheating, and you likely are on to a winner. To my academic colleagues asking for evidence I have to say that I do think students everywhere cheat in significant numbers. It's simply the case that some institutions care more so than others about catching cheats. A low number of caught cheats in my reality is not evidence of fewer cheats, rather it is evidence of lax enforcement and monitoring.

In unrelated news, the BBC reports that Germany is today the world's most popular country, closely followed by Britain...

German Federal Court on PID

Imagine my surprise when I read in today's paper about a judgment from Germany's Federal Court in a case determining the legality or otherwise of pre-implantation diagnosis. Just so you get the significance of this, here's a blurb from Wikipedia about the relevance of the Federal Court in Germany's legal pecking order: 'The Federal Court of Justice of Germany (German: Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) is the highestcourt in the system of ordinary jurisdiction (ordentliche Gerichtsbarkeit) in Germany. It is the supreme court (court of last resort) in all matters of criminal and private law. A decision handed down by the BGH can only be reversed by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in rare cases when the Constitutional Court rules on constitutionality (compatibility with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany).'

The Court determined that it is OK to check for serious genetic defects of embryos prior to implantation in couple with known serious genetic illnesses. In one of the cases the woman considering conceiving another child had already given birth to a disabled daughter, another woman went thru three failed pregnancies. It goes without saying that embryos that are non implanted after PID took place (ie after serious genetic defects have been diagnosed) will be destroyed.

Critics have trotted out the usual stuff like that this discriminates against the disabled, and that this takes us on a slippery slope to designer babies (ie selection in favor of blue eyed kids was mentioned). It is true that the court judgment takes a clear stance on the former issue. If at the embryonic stage it is possible to make a choice between a future seriously disabled child and a healthy (healthier) child, the latter is preferable and it is up to pregnant women to decline the implantation of the embryo known to be defective. On the latter issue, currently such choices would not be covered by the judgment, but frankly, what if someone chose blue eyes over brown eyes, or brown eyes over blue eyes, what danger would this really entail? If someone - like me - subscribes to the ethical stance (as I do) that women are very much entitled to make reproductive choices entailing abortions, for any reason or none, why should it matter that they decline the implantation of an embryo with the wrong eye color?

I do think my progressive friends need to think carefully about whether or not they support unconditionally a woman's right to make reproductive choices. If they do, the above mentioned slippery slope arguments must not faze them.

Assisted dying OK in Germany under certain circumstances

Imagine my surprise when I read in today's paper about a judgment from Germany's Federal Court in an assisted dying case. Just so you get the significance of this, here's a blurb from Wikipedia about the relevance of the Federal Court in Germany's legal pecking order: 'The Federal Court of Justice of Germany (German: Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) is the highest court in the system of ordinary jurisdiction (ordentliche Gerichtsbarkeit) in Germany. It is the supreme court (court of last resort) in all matters of criminal and private law. A decision handed down by the BGH can only be reversed by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in rare cases when the Constitutional Court rules on constitutionality (compatibility with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany).'

So, today said court ruled that if someone competent has decided they wish to die, even if the nature of their illness does not suggest that their dying process has begun, whoever removes pro-actively their means of life-support has not broken German law. Further, in the case of unconscious patients the patients' likely intention is considered sufficient to make the removal of life support systems legal. In the case under consideration a reportedly a woman who had been in persistent vegetative state for 5 years had her means of life support terminated by her daughter based on the patient's expressed wishes. Part of the problem was that her wishes were only expressed verbally to her daughter prior to her coma, hence no written advance directive existed. The patient had no chance of an improvement of her clinical situation. I wonder whether different circumstances might have changed the verdict or whether this really suggests that self-determination takes priority over the purported sanctity of life in German law.

This, of course, is terrible news for those God people who believe that we are not entitled to make respect demanding decisions about how we wish to die.

Germany's Parliament on Advance Directives

To the surprise of many observers (given the still predominantly Christian culture in the country) the German parliament has resolved that patients' advance directives are legally binding. Doctors or other health care professionals who choose to ignore them will in future be prosecuted on grounds of having committed bodily assault. What is significant in a positive way is that such advance directives do not require that the patient in question suffers from a terminal illness. It's a bit odd, to my mind, that patients do not need to get doctors' advice on the substance of the advance directive (so as to ensure that their document really covers what they think it covers).

Of course, advance directives only kick in in circumstances where the patient is unable to express his or her own wishes, that's why they are needed in advance of a certain health problem that renders a patient for instance comatose. Doctors will have to ascertain whether or not the situation that the patient finds him- or herself in is covered by the advance directive. In case there's a conflict between the executors of the patients' wishes and the attending health care professionals' considered opinion, a court of law has to make the call on the advance directive. At this point in tome about 8 million adult Germans have issued legally binding advance directives. For the first time in German legal history these advance directives have legal bite, so to speak.

The German Catholic bishops have since raised 'concerns', as they usually tend to do when people make up their own minds about how they'd like to live and die.

Corruption - a problems of those (ethnically) others

It's true, isn't it? We hear the words corruption, tax evasion, theft, many people think immediately 'third world'. And, to be fair, there's a fair share of all of that in developing countries, BUT, us developed world whities are also not doing really badly on that front. Germany, that beacon of decency and honesty, has just been hit by a gigantic tax evasion scandal in the vicinity of about 4 billion Euro. Orchestrated by very wealthy business leaders (including, for instance, the boss of logistics company Deutsche Post) and aided and abetted by that funny financial outfit Liechtenstein (the European equivalent to Caribbean tax havens for tax evaders), in effect these richest of the rich in Germany stole billions of Euros from other tax payers. Not just a problem of the developing world then, it seems...

Off to a good week: Suharto dead, Xenophobia rejected in Germany

This has been a good weekend for many people. Mr Suharto, the kleptocrat former Indonesian leader (and good friend of the USA) has at long last died. His policies were directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Indonesia as well as in East Timor. Naurally, in return for receiving support from the land of the free he promised to fight Communists (right wing dictators always fought Communists, didn't they?). Well, Indonesia failed to ever hold him and his fellow mass murdering kleptocrats to account for their deeds. At least he is gone. One can only hope that Indonesia's prosecutors will now try to get as much of the loot Suharto extracted from government coffers and foreign companies as is possible back from his family.

There has been more good news, xenophobia has been rejected by the electorate fairly powerfully in the German state of Hesse. The first minister, Roland Koch, ran a campaign against foreigners living and working in the state, linking them indiscriminately to violence, his opponents (you guessed it) to communism and so on and so forth. His party suffered today a double-digit loss in terms of voter support. It is reassuring that xenophobic policies don't go down too well in post-unification Germany.

Guantanamo in Germany

This is simply excerpted from the GUARDIAN newspaper in London, UK. Truly frightening stuff. I will post at the end of the item some information permitting you to support the academics in question.

Guantánamo in Germany

The Guardian, 21.08.2007

In the name of the war on terror, our colleagues are being persecuted - for the crime of sociology. By Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen

'Terrorism" has two faces. There are real threats and real terrorists, and then again there is a realm of nameless fears, vague forebodings and irrational responses. The German federal police seem to have succumbed to the latter: on July 31 they raided the flats and workplaces of Dr Andrej Holm and Dr Matthias B, as well as of two other people, all of them engaged in that most suspicious pursuit - committing sociology.

Dr Holm was arrested and flown to the German federal court in Karlsruhe; he has since been put in (pre-trial) solitary confinement in a Berlin jail. Of course the police may have solid, rational knowledge they are withholding, but their public statements belong to the realm of farce. Dr B is alleged to have used, in his academic publications, "phrases and key words" also used by a militant group, among them "inequality" and "gentrification". The police found it suspicious that meetings occurred with German activists in which the sociologists did not bring their mobile phones; the police deemed this a sign of "conspiratorial behaviour".

Thirty years ago Germany had a terrible time with indisputably violent militant groups, and that leaden memory hangs over the police. And it may well be that "gentrification" is a truly terrifying word. But this police action in a liberal democracy seems to fall more into Guantánamo mode than genuine counter-espionage.

Consider the hapless Dr B a little further. He's not actually accused of writing anything inflammatory, but seen rather to be intellectually capable of "authoring the sophisticated texts" a militant group might require; further, our scholar, "as employee in a research institute has access to libraries which he can use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to the drafting of texts" of militant groups, though he hasn't writtten any. The one solid fact the cops have on Dr Holm is that he was at the scene of the "resistance mounted by the extreme leftwing scene against the World Economic Summit of 2007 in Heiligendamm", perhaps mistakenly believing he is studying this scene rather than stage-managing it.

These are not reasons for Brits, any more than Americans, to cluck in righteous disapproval; in the long, sad history of the IRA, reality and fantasy entwined in an ever tighter cord. But, apart from hoping that our colleague Dr Holm will be freed if only he promises to carry his mobile phone at all times, we are struck by the grey zones of fragile civil liberties and confused state power that this case reveals.

The liberal state is changing. In the 60s, Germany had the most enlightened rules for refugees and asylum seekers in Europe; the US passed the most sensible laws on immigration in its history; France granted automatic citizenship to all those born on its territory, including all Muslims. Today all these countries have, in the name of the war on terror, revised their rules - the state of emergency prevails. The laws meant for real threats are invoked to counter shapeless fear; in place of real police work, the authorities want to put a name - any name - to what they should dread. States of emergency are dangerous to the legitimacy of states. In cases conducted like this one, a government stands to lose its authority and so its ability to root out actual terrorists.

If our colleagues are indeed dangerous sociologists, they should be prosecuted rationally. But, as in Guantánamo, persecution seems to have taken the place of prosecution.

Richard Sennett is a sociologist at the London School of Economics; Saskia Sassen is a sociologist at Columbia University

Here is a site for people wishing to express solidarity with the two sociologists

Doitschland, Doitschland - East German's police fails victims of racist attacks

There's something truly strange about this. East Germany, especially under the iron rule of the former Communist Party, went out of its way to welcome foreigners and celebrated international solidarity. And yet, we (well, we in the West) always kind of knew, that the average East German was substantially more conservative (a Spiessbuerger) than the average West German citizen. It didn't come as a great surprise then that after the fall of the wall and the purchase of East Germany with the West German mark (aka the 'unification') xenophobia and racist attacks would be much worse in the East than they were in the West.

Things have deteriorated ever since. During the recent soccer world cup leading politicians of the Labor Party (a party represented in the federal government) warned people belonging to visible ethnic minorities not to venture too far into the East because their safety could not be guaranteed. For German government politicians to acknowledge that law and order could not be guaranteed everywhere in the country was a colossal kind of some sort of defeat for the liberal democracy that Germany undoubtedly is these days.

Since then incredibly so, things have got worse. Reports suggest that police officers fail in their duties toward victims of racially motivated attacks and other forms of violence. For instance, recently a Vietnamese family was attacked by several adult males from the neighbouring flat, they gained entry by kicking the door in. Eventually the vandals left and the Vietnamese family called the police in. Officers duly showed up, interviewed the attackers and left. Wisely the Vietnamese family left their home and slept elsewhere. The Neonazis returned that very same night and vandalised the family home. Police was nowhere to be seen.