A Journal's Statement May Aid a Harvard Researcher Accused of Misconduct
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In a positive development for Marc Hauser, the Harvard researcher whom the university accused last year of eight charges of scientific misconduct, the journal Science said Monday that he had replicated an experiment he published in 2007.
Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave, unable to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.
Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book "Moral Minds," which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.
Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.
Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science's referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results "replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance."
The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.
First Published April 26, 2011 12:00 am
