So, what exactly do you do for Evil McSinister Corporation?

Science magazine has an article on one of those ubiquitous, awkward situations that anyone who works for the chemical, pharmaceutical or biotech industry must find themselves in at least once or twice in their careers: having to explain to a suspicious and wary interlocutor why exactly they work for Evil McSinister Corporation that's responsible for so many of the World's Woes. The author of the article documents the experience of a scientist who works for Monsanto:

“It must be hard,” I thought, “having to preface every answer to ‘What do you do?’ with ‘So, uh, here’s the thing.’”

VanderKraats confirmed this suspicion when I spoke with him after the panel. He said that there are a lot of misconceptions about his employer, and that he’s had a few awkward conversations in which he’s had to basically explain that his job—developing algorithms to analyze data about phenotypes and genetics—is not tantamount to throwing baby bunnies into a wood chipper.

“I think we contribute positively to the world,” VanderKraats told me, “but sometimes I still hesitate a little to reveal that in a conversation, because you’re not really sure if the person on the other end is an opponent.”

The article actually touches on a very important ethical dilemma than many scientists face: what do you do when, along with some bonafide positive contributions that it's making to the economy and to society, your company is also clearly engaging in some activities that would make even the most ethically hardened soul cringe? News about DuPont, Pfizer and a host of other corporations during the last few years has not done much to bolster the public's faith in these entities. 

Tragically though, the real good that some of these organizations have done along with the sheer complexity and challenges of the research that they are engaging in are two themes that somehow don't seem to filter as much to the lay public. No matter how extensively you may philosophize about why drug discovery is hard, the two main questions which you get asked when you mention you do pharmaceutical research are almost always, "Why are drugs so damn expensive?" and "Why do drugs have so many damn side effects"? That latter question is usually a good cue to transition into a succinct explanation of the scientific challenges of drug discovery: how even the basic science of the process is still woefully under informed, how if we knew how to get rid of side effects, we would with every fiber in our being, how the sheer risk and attrition in drug development can kill a compound during the end game, even after it has jumped over every single obstacle, how drug hunters need to have an appetite for risk that surpasses MacArthur's. By this time though, you are hoping that the person grilling you has not moved on to the next target of his or her outrage.

There's no simple answer to this dilemma. But one of the pieces of wisdom that emerges from thinking more about the issue is that it's almost impossible to work for any institution that does not flirt with morally questionable practices. 

After all, nearly every employer is perceived as evil by someone. If you’re in the chemical industry, you’re poisoning the world. If you’re developing medicines, you’re a shill for Big Pharma. If you’re an engineer at an energy company, you hate pelicans. If you’re in academia, you’re sneering at the peasants from your ivory tower. NASA wastes taxpayer money. Meteorologists are always wrong. Every form of energy production sucks. Military scientists love war. Mathematicians are superfluous. None of our results can be replicated, we’re all drawing unsurprising conclusions, and none of us would allow moral concerns to interfere with results.

I’d like to think that scientists have an ethical obligation to ensure that our work does no harm. It’s a credo I stole from the medical students. But at the same time, we can’t be held responsible for every decision our employers make—especially because most of us have very little power at our places of employment.

Indeed. Institutions after all are run by human beings, and human beings are flawed, and some are downright evil. I think that up to a fairly large margin of error, you can't be held accountable for what some of these human beings in your organization are doing as long as you are not complicit in their actions or have no knowledge of their activities. Where one draws the lines in this regard is hard to pinpoint and is an individual decision, although the extremes as usual are easy to identify: if I worked for a company whose senior management regularly ate babies on live television I probably won't have qualms turning in my resignation right away. Similarly if an organization has a serial record of engaging in unethical financial or environmental behavior combined with a shockingly blatant disrespect for its employees' well-being, it wouldn't be hard to strike that organization off your potential employer list.

Anything between those two extremes is up for debate though, especially at the lower end of the scale. So what does one do when asked why his or her organization was recently indicted for poisoning the waters of that pristine river that flows through your town? I think the article has it right in that whatever the reply is, it needs to be honest and balanced. I would be the first one to admit that like other corporations, drug companies do sometimes engage in patently unethical practices. I would make sure to make it known that I strongly believe that those who encourage such practices should be prosecuted proportionately. But I also would equally emphasize the countless lives that have been saved by drugs, the incredible, often heartbreaking complexity of the basic science of drug discovery and in fact the great positive contribution of chemistry and related sciences as a whole to our modern way of life. Or I could just do a George Whitesides.

On the ethics of that "chocolate sting" study

By now many people must have heard of the so-called "chocolate sting" carried out by scientist and journalist John Bohannon. In a nutshell, what Bohannon did was to carry out a fake study on a very small sample of people that purported to investigate the effects of a chocolate-laced diet on weight. The study was actually perfectly done except for the statistics which were nicely massaged to conform to what's called 'p-hacking', the selective cherry-picking of results to correspond to statistical significance.

Bohannon and his colleagues then published the "study". Perhaps to nobody's surprise, both journalists and popular magazines jumped on it and proclaimed a new era of chocolate-enabled weight loss. Bohannon has written an article about his sting on the website iO9 which is now all over the Internet. The message from the article is that the gullibility of both journalists and the lay public is well and alive when it comes to swallowing incredulous health-related results. The result was especially depressing because one would think that even uninformed people would be skeptical about the supposedly beneficial effects of chocolate on weight.

Personally when I read about the sting and people's reactions to it I was immediately reminded of the Sokal hoax. Granted that the Sokal hoax did not perform experiments on human beings, but it too relied on deception and a sting operation to reveal the dirty truth. In that case the truth pertained to the tendency of people who called themselves "postmodernists" to dress up nonsensical notions in pseudoscientific language and try to present them as serious theories. Sokal wrote a deliberately nonsensical article and sent it to 'Social Text', the leading postmodernist journal. To his surprise it was enthusiastically published and touted as a novel insight into science and human nature. The emperor had been disrobed.

Bohannon's hoax applies to a different field but it is essentially in the same spirit. The goal of the hoax is to show that the emperor of uncritical thinking and statistical ignorance has no clothes. And the one thing the hoax managed to demonstrate is that emperors of this kind are running all over the place, and in fact each one of us has a bit of them rooted in our own thinking.

The study has drawn mixed reactions. For instance Ben Goldacre, slayer of bad science and medical studies, has praised the sting and said that it "deserves a prize" while Seth Mnookin, another slayer of bad science and campaigner against anti-vaxxers, has condemned it and called it "reprehensible". The most common reason why people are condemning the study is because they see no value coming out of it and because they see it as unethical: Bohannon did not seek approval from anything like an institutional review board (IRB) or inform his subjects about the goals of the study and get their approval (although he did lay out the general outline).

I myself got into a lively debate about the study on Twitter with two longstanding members of the science blogging community - Aatish Bhatia who blogs at Wired and Bethany Brookshire who blogs under the name Scicurious. Aatish and Bethany's concerns about the study were the same as those of Mnookin and others: the authors did not get their subjects' consent and approval from an IRB, and the value of the study was marginal at best. The thinking was, there have been several exposes of bad science and journalism in the past few years, so what exactly does this ethically dubious work demonstrate?

Here are my responses to these objections: First of all I agree with Aatish and Bethany that strictly speaking the study is not ethical. But then so aren't hundreds of other studies, especially in areas like psychology where detailed disclosure of the study goals themselves might change people's psychology and thwart those goals. Even the Sokal hoax with its explicit deception of journal editors and thousands of readers was not strictly ethical, and yet it is now regarded as a landmark critique of pseudoscience. In some cases, as long as no harm is being explicitly done to human subjects, it is only by withholding all the details that one can do a truly blinded and clean study. Bohannon's project was as much a psychology project as a nutrition project. In fact strictly speaking even most medical trials are unethical in the sense that they are run some time after the purported drug has shown a beneficial effect relative to the controls. If complete consent to every detail was a required condition for scientific experiments involving human beings, then most research projects in psychology and medicine would be deemed 'unethical.'

My bigger point though is that a discussion of ethics cannot be divorced from consequences, and any assessment of the ethical nature of research has to be done relative to the potential benefits and costs of the research. Viewed through this lens, the Bohannon study acquires a more interesting tinge. The most important benefit of the project would be an inculcation of a sense of skepticism and caution in the laypeople, journalists and magazines which were fooled. Aatish and Bethany are skeptical that such a sense would be ingrained in the victims. At the very least I agree that one would have to do a follow-up study to find out whether people have indeed become more enlightened and cautious and whether a sizable fraction of those who were fooled are now aware of the hoax.

But personally I am more hopeful. While P T Barnum's observation that a sucker is born every minute does ring true, it is also true that people often remember to be circumspect only after they have been shamed or embarrassed into doing so. Sometimes it's only a jolt of reality that can awaken people to reality. Granted that the jolt may be exaggerated, simplistic or disingenuous - in that sense Bohannan's work is what I would call the Michael Moore style of research - but it can lead to results that may not be acquired by a gentler approach. It's not the best approach, should be used sparingly and can be easily seen as cynical, but I would be surprised if it does not work. I would be surprised if at least a few of the magazines which fell hook line and sinker for Bohannon's ruse didn't think twice next time before enthusiastically publishing such results. Even if a few of them turn more skeptical I think the study would have had considerable value.

Another reasonable objection raised was that the ploy might cause people to become too skeptical and lead to a mistrust of even legitimate science from next time onwards. This is a valid point, but my response to it is to ask the question: would we rather err on the side of safety or on the side of caution (ideally we would rather not err at all, but that's a different story)? Aatish's answer was that we should try to err on the side of minimizing harm. I agree with this, but in my view harm is of different kinds. Aatish was presumably talking about the harm done to people's psyche that might cause them to mistrust honest science and journalism, but I believe that the harm done from ignorance of the scientific method and statistics is even greater, that it can lead to an equal or greater erosion of trust in science and rationality. If I were indeed to pick between the sides of overt skepticism and overt gullibility, even with my reservations I would pick the side of overt skepticism.

Ultimately my feeling about this study is that it's the kind of bitter medicine that should be administered occasionally for the health of a rational society. Strictly speaking it's not ethical, but its ethics should be balanced against its consequences. Its liberal use would indeed lead to a jaundiced populace that trusts nothing, but using it once in a while might actually cause a statistically significant increase in that skepticism that we all sorely need. And that's a good thing.