The Fall Issue of the Professional Ethics Report, a newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. was not at all about the science most of us grew up admiring. Consider only the news items on the front page.

The first reported that Congress has appropriated $2,760,000 to establish a National Practitioner's Data Bank for information of adverse action taken by state medical boards, courts, hospitals, medical societies, insurance companies, peer review committees, and the like against physicians and other "health care workers. "The Data Bank is supposed to make it harder for physicians and medical researchers to avoid the harsh consequences of wrongdoing simply by moving from one job (or jurisdiction) to another.

The newsletter's second item announced that the period for public comment had ended on new Public Health Service regulations enlarging the responsibilities of grantee institutions and funding agencies to respond to charges of scientific fraud or other misconduct.

A third item reported a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations in which its chair, Rep. Ted Weirs, expressed concern that neither universities nor the National Institutes of Health seem capable of dealing with a charge of scientific misconduct or of protecting whistleblowers. Rep. Weirs also suggested that the increasingly close relationships universities and individual researchers are developing with pharmaceutical houses and other businesses could jeopardize the objectivity of related university research.

Yet another story reported that Stephen E. Breuning, a researcher who had falsified some government-funded drug treatment studies, had been sentenced by a U.S. district court to five years probation, 60 days in a halfway house, and performing 250 hours of community service. He was also ordered to repay $77,352 to the National Institute of Mental Health and to refrain from psychological research while on probation. Breuning will go down in history as the first scientist whose scientific misconduct was punished as a criminal act. He does not seem destined to be the last.

The Professional Ethics Report carried one more story in this vein. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) is reviewing the ease of a researcher who submitted copies of a fabricated article to over 100 professional journals as part of a study to assess their review procedures. Several of the journals filed complaints against the researcher, charging that he had violated the NASW's code of ethics by deceiving the subjects of his research. The standard of good research today seems to differ considerably from what it was a decade or two ago when deceiving research subjects was still routine.

These news items suggest great changes in our understanding of scientific research-and, perhaps too, of science generally. They also suggest a need to look much more closely at the ethics of science. We have taken that suggestion.

This issue of Perspectives begins with Robert Sprague's account of how he blew the whistle on Stephen Breuning, why he did it, and what happened as a result. Except for Sprague's tenacity, it is a sad story indeed. Though Sprague stresses the importance of Breuning's research for ordinary people, we are likely to be struck more try how most of the scientists, university administrators, and government officials involved seem to have acted as if the research affected no one at all.

In a second piece, Ullica Segerstrale, a sociologist, tries to understand why contemporary physics has so far seemed free of the misconduct be deviling the health and social sciences. Her preliminary research suggests that physics is not so much free of scientific misconduct as such as distant enough from application of its research to allow bad work to be detected as one researcher tries to build on the work of another. Physicists do not much care what the cause of error might have been.

In a third piece, Robert Bergman describes the difficulties a chemist routinely has in replicating the experiments of others. The difficulties seem to be much greater than in physics-at least according to Segerstrale's physicists. Bergman suggests that most failures to replicate probably result from unnoticed variations in laboratory practice, not from "trimming," "cooking,' "fudging," or other unethical conduct.

Last, Dow Woodward, a biologist, argues for a very wide interpretation of research ethics, especially for biology. He in fact thinks that "bioethics" (as he calls it) must begin with an appreciation of what science really is (and of what it can be). Woodward (like Sprague) now teaches a course in the ethics of scientific research (or, as he might call it, in the ethics of science). Such courses may some day be as common as courses in business ethics or biomedical ethics are today.