Mendel, who discovered the laws of heredity, was an abbot of the St Thomas monastery in Brünn, Austria (now Brno in Czechoslovakia). Even though he was a priest, he did not have to devote much time to religious activities. His education and interest in science enthused his seniors in the church to help him pursue his interest. Mendel experimented with pea plants in his quest to understand how biological characteristics are inherited. He stood apart from other biologists of his time, who were mostly observing the natural. Mendel instead decided what and how he should be observing; he designed his own crosses of pea plants. He also stood apart because his thinking was quantitative and kept meticulous “counts” of progeny from thousands of crosses. His University training in mathematics had empowered him to mathematically analyse these data and propose a theory of heredity. Using mathematics in biology was unheard of then. Mendel was far ahead of his time.
When he presented his results to the Society for the Study of the Natural Sciences in Brünn in 1865, “not a solitary soul had understood him”. Mendel would never know how powerfully his discoveries would impact science and humanity; his achievements languished in obscurity until well beyond his death in 1884. Mendel’s laws were “rediscovered” in 1900. Mendel’s theory of inheritance as “particulate” entities was not easily accepted even after its rediscovery, since many scientists could not fathom how “particles” could help explain inheritance of continuous characters, such as height. Ronald A Fisher, the father of modern statistics, figured this out in a landmark paper published in 1918.
However, Fisher also introduced a source of controversy. His statistical analysis showed that Mendel’s experimental data were “too perfect.” He concluded that “there can be no doubt that the data … have been biased strongly in the direction of agreement with expectation”. Fisher tried in vain to find alternative explanations to the “too perfect” fit. Eventually, he wrote, “Although no explanation can be expected to be satisfactory, it remains a possibility among others that Mendel was deceived by some assistant who knew too well what was expected.” Fisher never doubted Mendel’s scientific integrity. Statistician geneticist Anthony Edwards also reanalysed Mendel’s data and supported Fisher’s conclusions. We will never know how the data may have been doctored; after Mendel’s death, the boxes of data-notebooks and other apparently worthless papers were destroyed by his successor abbot.
The famous evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky was also kind to Mendel, but did not exonerate him of wrongdoing; “Not having been familiar with chi-squares and other statistical tests, Mendel may have, in perfect conscience, thrown out some crosses which he suspected to involve contamination with foreign pollen or other accident.”
However, doctoring of data, whether it was done by Mendel himself or by an assistant, needs to be unlearnt. Data manipulation is incompatible with the spirit and the method of conduct of science. Unfortunately, scientific misconduct is increasing here and elsewhere. A few days ago, the French Office for Research Integrity drafted an oath that PhD recipients in France will soon have to take on the day they successfully defend their thesis. “I pledge, to the greatest of my ability, to continue to maintain integrity in my relationship to knowledge, to my methods and to my results.” This is possibly the first national initiative of its kind. It is a symbolic step; the oath alone cannot prevent scientific misconduct.
In India, scientific misconduct is quite prevalent. Image manipulation appears popular among biologists. The driver of misconduct is that observations must fit well with expectations under one’s favoured hypothesis. A “good fit” increases the chance of the scientific paper getting published in a journal with a “high impact factor.”
A scientist with several publications in high impact factor journals gets national fellowships and awards. When caught for having indulged in scientific misconduct, students pursuing PhD under the professor are invariably blamed. There is pressure to ‘produce’ PhDs in greater numbers. Producing more PhD students is also rewarded by rapid professional promotions. Hence many professors simultaneously supervise the doctoral work of over a dozen students.
Is it even possible to provide meaningful supervision to such numbers of students? A chain of command, that likely promotes misconduct, is practiced. The work of an entry-level doctoral student is “supervised” by a senior doctoral student, the senior doctoral student is an apprentice to a post-doctoral fellow; the professor only has the time to discuss with the post-doctoral fellows – half-a-dozen of whom are often under traineeship of the professor. This “factory-line” approach to the practice of science is in itself unethical and is conducive to scientific misconduct, but is now widely practised. A sea change in attitude and practices is of immediate and paramount necessity.
(The writer is National Science Chair & Founder, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics)