The Ethical Stupidity of Med School Professors: Plagiarism Very Very Bad, Ghostwriting Okay

Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.

Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.

What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in. (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.

Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.

Thanks to Dave Lull.