Preparing to atone, Part 1: Some context

I’ve been preparing to start trying to make up for a specific scientific sin from 2008.

The particular sin must have happened before, plenty of times. But on the other hand but it’s not been widely talked about. I’m not even sure it has a name.

For now, class it as a sin of omission.

In this case, “failure to publish”.

Where failure to publish arguably contributed to long term negative consequences.

Before I get to the story of the sin, its consequences, and the idea for atonement, consider some context.

Scientists can commit crimes. For example, suppose that a scientist in my lab bashes in a coworker’s head with a hammer. In those cases head-basher has committed a crime, but there is nothing about that crime specific to scientists or to science. The facts that the act happened in a lab, or that both the basher and the entity harmed were scientists, are not relevant. The criminality of the act is well defined in written law that applies to individuals in Washington State. And so police action, indictment, trial, and appropriate sanction for the offending scientist will be decided in State of Washington vs. Basher.

Scientists can also commit crimes not recognized in criminal law.

Of these, the most heinous is scientific fraud. Defined here as the as claiming to have established the truth of some assertion without having done the work that supplies probative evidence or in the face of experimental evidence that fails to establish the truth claim.

Suppose someone fakes experimental data to support a claim, and uses that to publish a paper that makes the claim. That person has committed scientific fraud. The reason that the State of Washington does not criminalize this action is that no person or thing in the state is harmed.

In science fraud, the thing harmed is the integrity of the ever-accreting and constantly refined and corrected body of truth about the natural world. The victim here is science itself.

Because truth of new work (and the ability to carry it out in the first place) must rest on truth of the previous work, scientific fraud, un-noticed and uncorrected constitutes a mortal threat to the generation of true knowledge.

Because of the magnitude of the threat, the scientific community has a number of means to prevent and detect possible fraud before publication and after. This prevention and detection apparatus is, to put it mildly, imperfectly robust. If past fraud comes to light, the scientific community and the institutions supporting it also have a number of slightly more robust means to sanction the perps. Some of these are formal (eg denial of government funding) and are imposed as a result of decision arrived at by some due process, while some are tribal (shaming and shunning).

Floating well below fraud exists a vast range scientific misconduct including badmouthing other scientists and activities like boasting, and making exaggerated claims of novelty. Most of these actions count as sins.

Here, I think what we have is some sort of crime against science, or at least sin against science. But when does failure to act, in this case failure to publish, count as a sin?