The research seminar discusses the ethics of:

• Keeping a lab notebook (all published data should be traceable to a grad student's notebook?)
• Data management (how should computer files be stored, is the original data file avaiable?)
• Lab safety
• Cherry picking data, massaging data to make it look better (where are the boundaries? how much is okay?)
• Spending federal money and state money in the spirit of a proposal.
• How much should your supervisor trust your honesty vs. check your honesty?
• Assignment of research topics to grad students (how much overlap is okay, when can a research project be given to someone else?)

The graduate communications seminar discusses the ethics of:

• Authorship (the importance of clear communication during a project and when choosing first author and contributing authors for a paper).
• Responsibilities associated with citations (reading the articles you cite, self referencing is okay?, obligation to cite everyone who worked in your field?)

For physics researchers (and others) social and institutional factors are pushing us towards ethical boundaries. Keeping our jobs, getting funding, getting published often seem to be at odds with doing good careful science. The Schon case brings up many of these issues, and shows the cost/damage to science and society and people step over the line.

Wikidepdia summary of Schon scandal

Report of the Schon Investigation Committee

Plastic Fantastic, the book by Eugenie Reich

• A question for the class to brainstorm: How did Schon's misconduct affect Profs, grad students, postdocs and funding agencies who were eager to follow up his work?