Title | Which Assay to Believe? |
Long Title |
Which Assay to Believe? |
Contributor/Contact | John Banja, PhD (jbanja@emory.edu) |
Contributor Details |
John Banja, PhD Director, Section on Ethics in Research Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 |
CTSA | Emory |
Case Study Provided |
My PI and I were working on an experiment to see if Y occurred when a particular gene was knocked out. If Y did indeed occur, we would be keen to publish the finding. Determining whether or not Y occurred would require our doing some assays. The problem was that assay #1 confirmed Y, but assay #2 disconfirmed Y. It must be noted that these were not duplicate assays but completely different ones. And repeated assays of both types kept giving us the same contradictory findings. So, the first issue was the temptation to simply tell my PI of the preferred result, namely the one that confirmed Y. I told myself this wouldn’t be a lie, but it came close. So, I told the PI about both assays. At this point we were confronted with the following decisions: Should we publish (and therefore believe) the results from the assay that worked and disregard the “bad” one, assuming that the problem involved some flaw in that assay? Or should we mention in the publication that we were only able to show Y with one assay, and not with another? Or should we try a third assay and go with it (as a tie-breaker)? We went with the last strategy which fortunately confirmed Y and justified our paper. But suppose there wasn’t a third assay available? What then? |
Data Acquisition, Management, Sharing and Ownership Topics |
Ethical values behind the scientific standards for data acquisition_management_sharing and ownership, Variations in lab practices—legitimate and illegitimate variations, Scientific methodology issues including research design_objectivity and bias, Data reporting |
Mentor and Trainee Responsibilities Topics | No mentor and trainee responsibilities topics |
Publication Practices and Responsible Authorship Topics | No publication practices and responsible authorship topics |
Peer Review Topics | No peer review topics |
Collaborative Science Topics | No collaborative science topics |
Research Misconduct Topics | No research misconduct topics |
Conflicts of Interest, Law and Policy Topics | No conflicts of interest_law_and policy topics |
Human Subjects | No human subjects |
Citation | |
URL | http://www.actsi.org/areas/erks/ethics/index.html |
RCR Keyword | Research Paper |
Other RCR Keywords | Assays; Contradictory Findings; Experiment; Preferred Results; Selective Reporting |
Type of Case | |
Source for Topic Areas | Du Bois, J., & Dueker, J. (2009). Teaching and Assessing the Responsible Conduct of Research: A Delphi Consensus Panel Report. Journal of Research Administration, 40(1), 49-70. |
References | |
Other |