GROUP MISCONDUCT REGARDING LABORATORY PROCEDURE

You are a graduate student working as part of a group on a large project. The results from your group experiments are used for other experimental work. Your faculty supervisor, the principal investigator (PI) for the project, wants you to use a new procedure in your experimental work. She expects the new procedure to yield results that are better suited to the conditions of the other experimental work. The other members of your group do not want to change the procedure they have been using; the new one requires significantly more work. They believe the PI will not notice if the old procedure is used.

You rely on the group for assistance in your own thesis work, but if you go along with the decision to use the old procedure, the quality of the data will most likely be inferior; you will mislead the PI and perhaps the whole scientific community.

You argue for using the new procedure and informing the PI that the work will just have to take longer – information which she is not likely to receive well. The rest of the group is not persuaded.

What should you do and how can you go about it?

DOUBTS ABOUT PUBLISHED RESULTS

You are a computer science graduate student and for two years have been working on an operating system design in Professor Carr's group.