Sir

Nature devotes an editorial to the topic of “scientific misconduct”, takes a swipe at Congressman John Dingell and records that the US president's National Science and Technology Council has not been able to define the term in two-and-a-half years (Nature 394, 815; 1998).

As a student of science policy, I submitted to the council for consideration (as I do the entire science community) the question: why is “scientific misconduct” confined only to communication by scientists to scientists in scientific journals? What is the evidence that any substantial harm has been done to the progress of science, or to society which foots the bill? By these statistically infrequent and scientifically insignificant examples we only prove that scientists have average human behavioural characteristics.

It has been my thesis that what the science community must give more attention to is the scientific misconduct that is vastly more significant to society and to the total ecology of science. I refer to the misconduct in irresponsible or misleading communications to the public. Alvin Weinberg, founding director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and wise analyst of science policy, long ago wrote of the absolute necessity for means “to keep scientists honest and mechanisms for injecting more responsibility into the scientific debate, especially when it is conducted outside the scientific forum”, that is, in all dealings with the public.

Let us compare the two ‘victim’ populations. Each specialist science community is fully equipped and prepared to detect fraud (or honest error) in any paper. But the public is utterly defenceless against any exaggerated claim or hype, however egregious. Moreover, there may be enormous public consequences, such as the misdirection of billions of dollars resulting from such fraud or scientific misconduct because it influences the public.

It is also not possible for scientists to blame journalists for exaggerating their claims, unless they publicly disown them when they appear. I submit that all persons or bodies thinking about scientific misconduct should concern themselves first with the ethics of our behaviour when we deal with the public.