Search the CONFOCAL archive at
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal

I have been watching this discussion with much interest.  The issue that
Bill Oliver is addressing about making "all" of the data available has an
additional pitfall.  I am retired from a major pharmaceutical company and
scientist in our drug discovery, toxicology and clinical research divisions
all publish.  No pharmaceutical company is going to allow public access to
research data for network security and legal reasons.  So while making the
all data and images from a published study available on a website might work
for a university it would not be feasible for industry like pharma.  

I would suggest that all journals have guidelines about what which image
process operations are allowable and they must be reported - software used
and operations done as part of methods and materials, I would suggest
reporting acquisition parameters, if possible.  Then if a scientist is
discovered performing undocumented process there should be some penalty. If
a person does unethical manipulations often enough they will be found out.

My thoughts on the thread.

Mike Esterman
Imaging Consultant

-----Original Message-----
From: Confocal Microscopy List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Bill Oliver
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 1:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: An alarming amount of (statistical) image manipulation

Search the CONFOCAL archive at
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Christophe Leterrier wrote:

> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
> The space limitation only applies to the article by itself. As someone
> said earlier, digital space is cheap, I see nothing impossible in
> joining a 140 pages pdf as a supplementary data to a 5 pages article,
> so anyone who wants to go deeper in the data can, whereas those who
> wants to see the refined and discussed stuff read the article...


While this doesn't apply to most research, and may rarely apply to stuff in
microscopy, if folk are setting up ethics guidelines they should realize
that sometimes the *unethical* thing to do is make all the data available.

Let me use my recent study as an example.  The study is one in which I
looked at the effect of litigation by TASER, Inc. against Medical Examiners
who call the use of TASER a cause of death (COD) or contributing factor to
death.  In most cases these suits are brought only to force a change in the
COD.  However, in two cases TASER has brought suit personally against the
Medical Examiner and in at least one has sought compensatory and punitive
damages for opinions expressed by the Medical Examiner about the dangers of
the use of TASER.

I did a survey of Medical Examiners looking at if and how the threat of such
litigation affected their diagnoses and will affect their diagnoses in the
future.  The problem is that the number of Medical Examiners is small and
even though no names are attached to the survey, it is possible to link
individuals to particular answers with enough effort.  The trivial example
is that of the two cases TASER has brought suit personally, one is male and
the other female. Thus, if the answer to "has TASER brought suit against
you" is "yes" and you know the answer to "what is your gender," you know who
it is.  That is the most trivial example, but a little more work would allow
a good investigator to determine individual identities and use that data for
litigation.

Thus, I do not plan to release the data for public consumption, since part
of that public are people who would use this for further litigation.
Instead, I have placed the data in escrow with a forensic sciences institute
in Europe.  If someone has a specific question, folk will see if it can be
answered in a way that will not allow the mining for individual information.

I don't know if there's something analogous for microscopy -- none of the
work I did in confocal microscopy was like that.  However, broad and
cut-and-dried statements about such things sometimes don't acknowledge that
all circumstances are not the same.

This has also come up with the American Medical Association where, in
response to the brouhaha about Guantanamo, they passed an ethical rule
stating that physicians cannot observe police interviews lest they be
tainted by any abuse that happens.  It is clear that no forensic medicine
types had input to that ethical rule -- it would be malpractice if we did
*not* observe such interviews in such things as reconstructing the
circumstances of child deaths.  Thus, in their hurry to be politically
correct about a dramatic circumstance that is very rare, they made
"unethical" a fundamental,important and good practice in forensic pathology.
It's no surprise that only about 22% of physicians belong to the AMA any
more.

Accordingly, I am always a little antsy when people start opining about how
"all" of anything ought to be done "all" of the time, else it is an
"ethical" violation.


billo