BU Research Blog

I was idly flicking between TV channels last night, as you do, desperate to find something to watch for a few minutes before bed.  I eventually latched in a frenzy of button pushing – the batteries in the remote need changing – on yet another programme about Richard III, this time the ‘untold story’.  There has been some discussion amongst my peers about the ethics of this whole saga; not the ethics of digging up a king, but the ethics around how this discovery was presented to the world.  There is no doubt that presenting it via a series of news conferences and documentaries has maximised the publicity for the University of Leicester but is this the most ethical way for research to be presented?

 Research is dependent on the process of ‘peer review’ as the gate keeper of quality.  Nothing without peer review should be accepted by anyone as accurate and without flaw, at least so the doctrine goes.  I would probably go as far as to argue that it is unethical and damaging to the reputation of researchers for work to be published that has not undergone rigorous peer review, receiving that quality stamp.  If we take an extreme case I am sure you will agree with me.  A research lab has new results which claim that child vaccination is dangerous; should they be allowed to publicise their claim, causing public hysteria, until their work has been rigorously peer reviewed and the faults and limitations exposed critically?  I am sure you would agree that peer review prior to disclosure has an essential role here?  What if the science was flawed?  But is this not the same, at least in principle, as the case of Richard III?  The quest for the media stories and for the associated glory is not always a positive attribute within academia, being simply an extension of the ‘fame cult’ which seems to haunt modern society were everyone apparently wants to be the latest one hit wonder! 

 I know this bitterly from first hand.  In 2005 I was part of a research team which believed that it had discovered a series of footprints in Mexico which due to their age challenged early colonisation doctrine for the Americas.  The ideas were first subject to protracted review in the journal Nature and in parallel we were successful in being chosen to exhibit at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Society in 2005.  Our desire to publically launch the work at the exhibition became progressively out of sync with our plans to publish it; the exhibition was an immovable date and the review process fluid and on-going.  In fact by that stage we had abandoned Nature and submitted elsewhere.  At the time of the exhibition the new paper was only just under review and was not actually published until January of the following year, 2006.  Our opponents had a rebuttal published in Nature in December before the publication of the paper they were rebutting!  I went on to prove that these footprints were not in fact footprints at all, a paper four years later that took courage and cost me the friendship of my former collaborators.  It was the right thing to do however.  I view the publicity back in 2005 now with some mild embarrassment; the idea was simply wrong and a more cautious approach would have served better.  It did raise the profile of optical laser scanning and lead to the invitation that took me to Kenya in 2007 and some very real footprints, in fact the second oldest in the world.  But in my heart, and with the benefit of hindsight, I know that the quest for publicity before ensuring the rigorous foundations of the claim was wrong and I learnt a hard lesson about the power of patience and of peer review as the great gate keeper.  Yes peer review may inhibit some of our more creative and innovative ideas and encourages conformism to existing research doctrine, but despite these faults it does stand as a bulwark against bad research.

 I am in no way criticising those involved in the Richard III story, they choose to break their story in the way they did for good reason no doubt; it was after all a huge secret to keep.  But I do believe that in most situations there is an ethical issue of good practice here and a principle that needs upholding.  It is a question that BU has faced quite recently with respect to some of its research on prosthetics at the time of the Paralympics and we held the line at the time that no disclosure should be made until work had been rigorously peer reviewed.  It is a line that I am proud of, founded on personal experience and basic common sense.