Column from September/October 2002 issue of ASPB News.

"Mokita": The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea

Scenario: A highly accomplished graduate, "X," of a major research institution joins a new field seeking to expand their expertise and therefore become more marketable. You are delighted to have them: X wins a three-year NIH award to work in your lab. X starts off well, and you set X to work with a senior postdoc. Later, the senior postdoc publishes the paper without naming X as an author and misspells X's name so as to be unrecognizable in the acknowledgments. You did not warn X that they would not be an author and do not catch the error in the acknowledgments. X's output flags. Diagnosis of a major illness engendered by overwork ensues. You verbally encourage X to rest, but simultaneously admonish X to produce results. After these exchanges X does even worse. X fails to publish their postdoctoral work and moves on to another city in which they become a trapped spouse, unable to find a job that suits their talent.

What could you have done to be a better, ethical mentor?

One aspect of scientific integrity (see Bioethics Imperative VI in the May/June 2002 issue of the ASPB News) that we are ill-prepared to shoulder is ethical mentoring. We are trained at the bench and once we succeed there, we are whisked away to a land of grant writing, department/ industrial/governmental politics, committee meetings, teaching, and, if lucky, the running of a lab of eager, bright, goal-oriented people. We are not taught to deal with the human problems of running a lab. Compounding the problem, scientists as a group are not known for their people skills.

Ethical mentoring entails establishing your lab policy toward the following issues and sharing it with prospective lab members. If you are thoughtful and honest in crafting these rules, sharing them in advance allows the person to see who you are and to decide if they want to buy into your ethical system.

Policies to share are

• expectations of interpersonal conduct between you and between all personnel
• authorship: who gets it and how order of author decisions are made
• output expectations, including how many publications are expected, equipment sharing, and what hours you expect to see that person in the lab
• confidentiality with intellectual property (data and ideas) from your lab and from other labs
• policies for copyright and patents issuing from your lab
• what you do to resolve conflict in the lab.

Consider posting your policies on your web site or in an e-mail or a letter to prospective students so that you do not overlook these important ethical facets of being a mentor.

To be continued...

Dina Mandoli
University of Washington, Seattle
mandoli@u.washington.edu

Supporting materials can be found HERE.