The anti-fraud counselor

2011 Had a remarkable series of cases of scientific fraud. In Germany, a widely publized case came to light last March, when Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, at the time Germany’s Minister of Defense and widely considered a likely heir to Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, resigned when instances of plagiarism were found in over 90% of the pages of his PhD thesis. The scandal has even given the German language a new verb: ‘guttenbergen’, or ‘to shamelessly copy’.

The Netherlands had its own set of scientific scandals in 2011. Perhaps most notably the case of Diederik Stapel, who lost his job as professor and dean of social psychology at the University of Tilburg, when it emerged that he had made up data on a large scale. In another prominent fraud case, Don Polderman, a cardiologist, was fired from his job as professor at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam for falsifying data and for failing to obtain patient consent for medical procedures.

For anything good to (possibly) come out of these cases, we should ask ourselves what we, as individual researchers and as an academic community, can do to avoid similar instances of scientific dishonesty occurring in future. I believe the answer is to be found on several levels. First, on an individual level, as researchers we must keep scientific integrity in highest regard. The search for truth is at the heart of the scientific enterprise. However, this is not enough. Second, on the level of research groups and departments, we must strive to create an environment of open discussion, free exchange and good scientific practice. I believe that such an environment is the best safeguard against scientific fraud. Third, on the departmental and university level, we need clear rules and competent structures to appropriately address (possible) cases of scientific misconduct. While reporting on high profile fraud cases tends to emphasize the ‘moral’ failure of the individual researcher, I feel that it is as important to draw lessons about the desirable research environment and the organizational framework for handling allegations of fraud.

In the case of Diederik Stapel, it turns out that in the past several students had already raised concerns about the integrity of his scientific methods, but these concerns were not acted upon. One concrete lesson would be to have an ‘ombudsperson’ or confidential counselor who could be approached with suspicions of scientific misconduct. In my opinion, this person should be i) impartial, ii) confidential, iii) easy to find, and iv) approachable. In Tilburg, the confidential counselor was the Rector Magnificus himself – hardly someone who is easy to

approach for a student or post doc.

TU Delft has recently published a ‘Code of Ethics’, which I find quite disappointing in this regard. While the topic of whistleblowing is explicitly addressed (section 3.2.8.), it says very little of substance about what to do if one encounters (suspected) scientific misconduct. The document explicitly refers to ‘TU Delft Regulations for Whistle Blowing’ that are nowhere to be found – at least not by searching the university’s website or the internet. This suggests to me that at TU Delft, like at many other universities, there is still work to be done to create an infrastructure for effectively addressing scientific misconduct.

Dr. Jan Lipfert, Post doc and Veni fellow, Department of Bionanoscience, Faculty of Applied Sciences.

See the ‘Interim Report Regarding the Breach of Scientific Integrity Committed by Prof. D.A. Stapel’

www.tilburguniversity.edu/nl/nieuws-en-agenda/commissie-levelt/interim-report.pdf

Before a gigantic wave reaching 10-metres high hit Japan, killing thousands and making 500,000 people homeless, it was already widely known that there was a high risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. For years the government had taken special precautions by building earthquake-proof buildings. Scientists at TU Delft praise the Japanese way of building. Nevertheless, many buildings could not withstand this recent natural disaster, including the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Three reactors were severely damaged and at least one caught fire.

TU Delft water management, construction and nuclear specialists believe the power plant could have been made safer if it was built on an artificial dwelling hill. They all stress that much research still needs to be done to learn lessons from the disaster. But a terp – the Dutch term for an artificial hill that is widely used in the Netherlands – would protect power plants. “It seems like the nuclear power plant resisted the earthquake, but the tsunami damaged the emergency engine-generator that had to cool down the reactors,” says Sander Pasterkamp, a structural and building engineering instructor at the faculty of civil engineering. “Building the power plant and the engine-generator on a hill or on thick concrete columns could have helped.”

Professor of Hydrology, Huub Savenije, agrees. “It’s not possible to stop a tsunami but one could redirect the water. By building a terp this is exactly what happens. The water flows around the artificial hill.”
Professor Tim van der Hagen, dean of the faculty of Applied Sciences and a nuclear reactors specialist, also agrees with the solution proposed by Prof. Savenije and Pasterkamp.

“A system usually fails because problems occur that one does not expect,” says Pasterkamp, who has helped design a building for nuclear waste in Petten, where a Dutch nuclear site is located. “In the Netherlands we protect the land with dikes and dunes against storm surges, but not against tsunami’s, although there is even a small chance that a tsunami could occur here. When a volcano explodes on Iceland for instance, there’s a risk. Will our nuclear power plants be able to withstand such a gigantic wave?”
“Probably not,” says Prof. Savenije, who visited Tokyo last year with students of the ‘Dispuut Water Management’ society.

Six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have encountered problems due to malfunctioning cooling systems. “After the earthquake the power was cut off. The emergency engine-generators functioned for an hour until the gigantic wall of water came. It is necessary to cool the warmth inside a reactor. Because there was no electricity the cooling system malfunctioned,” says Prof. Van der Hagen. “A different system running on batteries was used, until the batteries ran out of juice eight hours later. The reactors were cooled for at least nine hours because of this.”

Japanese technicians then tried to cool with seawater, but it couldn’t prevent several explosions that rocked the buildings and ripped of the reactors’ roofs and walls. Radiation levels rose and about 100,000 people living within 30 kilometres of the sites were told to stay inside. It is the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.