A few semesters ago, in one of our higher physics classes, we were asked to answer end-of-chapter questions on each of the 13 chapters of “On Becoming a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research,” a book published by the National Academies in the US. OBAS, as we fondly called it, is a crash course on navigating the intricacies of being a scientific researcher—it deals with topics ranging from allocating bylines in a research paper to more serious cases like plagiarism and scientific fraud.
I have to admit, answering those questions was a painful process of reading through the book’s case studies and ethical guidelines. It seemed too mechanical, especially if you just wanted to make it through the deadline. But I guess we dodged a bullet as the third-year physics majors right now have been asked to create a video regarding OBAS.
While that’s more laborious, I still don’t think that neither answering essay questions nor creating videos would impress the importance of OBAS among us, scientists-in-training. There is an attempt to teach the practicalities, but OBAS doesn’t teach us the ugly side of becoming a scientist, especially in the Global South. After all, guidelines and ethics are only as good as their practicability and replicability on the ground.
OBAS is a mere condiment to the full course—after learning about how subatomic particles decay or how a simple spring-block system could model nearly everything in physics, you force yourself to read the misdeeds of fellow scientists and word vomit your way into finishing the task. Along the way, you learn that falsifying data is bad, that keeping a handy laboratory notebook is essential in research work, that you always give credit to those who meaningfully contribute to your papers, and so on.
The problem with OBAS, though, is its complete detachment from the on-the-ground circumstances of students and scientists alike, especially in the Philippines. UP is lucky because it gets most of the country’s research funding. While it remains lacking, we’ve learned to appreciate that some funding is already better than no funding at all.
It isn’t a secret that funding for the country’s science and technology (S&T) sector has consistently remained low, compared to other budgetary areas. Our S&T funding dwarfs in comparison to our neighboring countries. While various superpowers are engaging in so-called “chip wars,” scientists here in the Philippines are busy fighting over relatively minuscule and scarce research funding. STEM students are forced to demonstrate their poverty by securing voluminous proofs to avail scanty S&T scholarship programs.
Sure, OBAS has taught us how to apply for grant proposals, how to deal with requests to become “honorary authors” in research publications, and how to commercialize and patent discoveries. While helpful, guides on research ethics seem to completely miss the realities that scientists encounter on a daily basis. The actualities of becoming a scientist in the Philippines render OBAS inconsequential–not even worthy of a one-unit credit here in the institute.
There is no point in teaching budding Filipino scientists the idealized version of the scientific community when, once we get our degrees and become full-fledged scientists, we will be bogged down with bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining grants and scholarships; we will be hindered by the feudal, sexist and strict seniority rules within our own institutions; and we will be appalled at how lousy the country’s intellectual property rights are.
OBAS doesn’t matter in a country with so much disdain and disregard for science and reason. Ethics be damned when your health secretary is a rabid red-tagger and misinformation peddler. Codes of conduct are sidelined when research associates are forced to undertake a vow of poverty because of chronic delays in salaries. The quest for groundbreaking discovery is impotent when our right to academic freedom is held at gunpoint.
I am pursuing research related to examining Filipinos’ voting patterns, in the hopes that I contribute to making science more relevant to the Philippine context. I thought, then, that physics, in particular, is already too alien and difficult to study topics too remotely connected to our daily plights. However, even that decision wasn’t enough. Lately, as I reflected, and grieved, over my unfinished undergraduate thesis, I’ve constantly asked myself what good it does knowing Filipinos’ voting patterns will do, and how it will help make our democracy work for everyone. It is a recurring question that I’ve yet to answer.
Of course, the teaching of OBAS in the institute and research ethics and conduct, in general, would become more relevant only if it begins to acknowledge the hard truths and deep-seated woes. Beyond knowing the dos and don’ts of scientific inquiry, it is equally imperative to interrogate the underfunding of the S&T sector, the dehumanizing measurement of a scientist’s worth by their scholarly output, and the disregard of scientific advice for political expediency. After all, building a kind of S&T that is relevant in our country isn’t just correct, but is also an ethical step.
My fervent hope is that, in my lifetime, I get to see science that is both relevant and a career that feeds. I long to see the day when colleagues will no longer shell out personal money to attend research conferences, when we no longer have to endure kilometric paper trails just to repair an ailing laboratory equipment, and when a researcher no longer has to juggle multiple jobs just to pay bills. These are predicaments that we ought to rework, beginning with what and how we teach our scientists-in-training–with or without OBAS. ●
