Candor and Integrity in Science

In the pursuit of researches and in the reporting of their results, the individual scientist as well as the community of fellow professionals rely implicitly on the researcher embracing the habit of truthfulness, a main pillar of the ethos of science. Failure to adhere to the twin imperatives of candor and integrity will be adjudged intolerable and, by virtue of science’s self-policing mechanisms, rendered the exception to the rule. Yet both as philosophical concepts and in practice, candor and integrity are complex, difficult to define clearly, and difficult to convey easily to those entering on scientific careers. Therefore it is useful to present operational examples of two major scientists who exemplified devotion to candor and integrity in scientific research. When scientists communicate with one another, they may be sometimes reticent on details, for example, about painfully acquired methods still needed in their current research, or about matters that have not yet been settled finally in their own minds or laboratories. But they rarely are not candid in what they convey to colleagues or even rivals in their field. For in scientific research there is a mechanism at work that may get one found out rapidly for improbity—a mechanism and an ethos much attenuated in most other professions (as the daily news tends to make clear, be they concerning politics, the military, industrial enterprises, the public media, lawyers, financial gurus, accountancies, even the priesthood). That mechanism is the ability of sufficiently trained, skeptical scientists to confirm or deny in principle, and sometimes quite quickly in fact, the veracity of a communication offered to them. Thus, while scientists are generally born no better or worse with respect to the general human tendencies to exaggerate or to deny, to misremember or to avoid sharing everything they know quite freely, in the acculturation process they learn to suppress those natural instincts, and try to put on what Jacob Bronowski named "the habit of truth," which is the key for the successful program of science as a whole. To be sure, when a nuclear scientist is asked about the details of a particle accelerator that is still being built, she may not always be forthcoming, but at least will reply quite appropriately—perhaps: "Sorry, I can't tell you yet"—a negative sort of candor. Candor, of the positive or negative kind, is not the same as integrity; but the two notions are related, as indicated in my copy of Roget's Thesaurus, where both notions are listed under "probity," together with rectitude, honesty, loyalty, truth, scrupulosity, and the like. Perhaps I can here illustrate each, and the