38 - My Ethical Dilemma

Summary

Note that I have altered a few details of this story to prevent the individuals in question from being identified. Aside from these minor changes, the tale I relate here is factually accurate.

When I was an advanced graduate student, I served for one summer and the beginning of a Fall semester as a part-time research assistant on a long-running project. The project was headed up Dr. B, a fairly recently minted MD who had been hired by a major university’s medical school. At the time, Dr. B was untenured, and was under intense pressure (which he related to me on several occasions) to publish articles in prestigious journals. Dr. B struck me as charismatic, hardworking, and ambitious. By his own admission, however, his methodological skills were not especially advanced, and he acknowledged feeling insecure as a new faculty member in a high-powered medical school environment.

One arm of the large project on which I assisted focused on neuro-psychological functioning in a widely researched adult psychiatric disorder. In my role as a research assistant, I met with Dr. B on numerous occasions and became intimately familiar with the test protocol, which was administered to psychiatric inpatients and nonpatient controls. Because I had extensive background in neuropsychological assessment, I administered the test battery to a number of patients, wrote up test reports, and periodically discussed the data collection and analysis plan with Dr. B.