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1.Early in grad school a VERY famous scientist visited. I watched him sit in the office of a PI I knew that excitedly showed him some awesome data. He was enthralled & asked for some unpublished reagents which he then used to scoop the PI (in Nature no less) giving them no credit
2. This really shocked me & made me ask some fundamental question about why scientists sometimes did the things they did. This visiting scientist was already famous, he had lots of Nature papers, why would he behave like this? Did he conceive of himself as being a good person?
3.I still dont know the answer to that but w/ time I've become convinced that in general scientists want to be good, they want to do the right thing. Behaving in the way this person did was the result of structural issues that allowed, facilitated, even encouraged, such behaviour
4. The core belief, that scientists are inherently good, is sometimes tested by our experience in the lab, say a bad faith review or withholding of published reagents. But it's easier to accept if we think of people as operating in a system that might not encourage good behaviour
5. This means that preventing acts of scientific maleficence such as what this scientist did should involve all of us. We can create structures & incentives that encourage people to be their best selves. I think the best way to achieve this is through +ve & not -ve reinforcement
6. We can help people to be good by creating a system that rewards doing things best not doing things 1st, a system that rewards collaboration, a system that provides job security to all, a system that evens out massive inequalities in resources & opportunities between scientists
7. I believe in the goodness of scientists based on what I've seen over the years: how good other scientists have been to our lab, how generous, helpful, & kind they've been & importantly how much more of a profound impact this has had on our science than when people acted badly.
