Quality Management
Associate editor Rachel Muenz speaks with research scientists Freya Freestone, MChem, and Helen O'Shea, BSc about data processing, analysis, and managing workflows in the lab.
Problem: According to the Allotrope Foundation, “Underpinning every experiment, every scientific decision, and every regulatory submission is data generated by a scientist using an instrument in the laboratory.” These mountains of analytical data are analyzed and interpreted in global R&D laboratories to help evaluate, identify, and characterize compounds and formulations.
According to court documents cited by the Des Moines Register, former Iowa State University researcher Dong-Pyou Han will plead guilty to charges of research fraud.
The STAP stem cell scandal at Japan’s RIKEN research institute officially came to a close on Friday where it was announced at an Osaka news conference that Haruko Obokata, the stem cell scientist behind the research, was unable to replicate her results in a recent set of experiments.
The Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) has issued a former University of Queensland researcher with a Notice to Appear in court on 16 fraud-related offences.
What is the value of laboratory accreditation? Whom does it benefit? And what are those benefits? What is the standard of competence? What value does accreditation have from an internationally recognized body such as the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation?
Labs of all kinds need standards, but they must be the right standards. Good standards are neither goals nor quotas that we will try to reach, but rather rules of behavior that we will follow every day, every time.
Assumptions scrutinized on career damage and funding waste
Particles of soot floating through the air and comets hurtling through space have at least one thing in common: 0.36. That, reports a research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is the measure of how dense they will get under normal conditions, and it’s a value that seems to be constant for similar aggregates across an impressively wide size range from nanometers to tens of meters.*
Problem: Researchers and scientists generate and collect vast amounts of data in their work, whether they are running experiments in the lab or surveying and interviewing people on the street. Researchers typically don’t deal with their research outputs until towards the end of the research cycle, when poor organization and data management can be difficult to manage and address, but causes the most problems. Poor data management results in experiments that are harder to replicate and findings that may be called into question. Papers can be retracted, careers impacted and ultimately science can suffer. When researchers move on they may pass their work to others in their research group, where poor data management results in the group inheriting indecipherable written notes they cannot use.
We’ve already seen less-than-savory practices from a few scientists recently due to the tough funding environment in research these days, whether that’s altering research findings or faking them altogether for more impressive results. In the latest example of such unethical behavior, two professors from the University of Houston have been charged with wire fraud and making false statements in order to get $1.3 million in research grants from the U.S. government, according to the Houston Chronicle.
