It's time India had a scientific ethics body

Need for an independent ethics body for India's science research has got stronger after a reputed science journal has recently withdrawn an Indian research study on cancer cells. On February 23, 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry called off a study by researchers from the Pune-based National Centre for Cell Sciences (nccs) on charges of data manipulation. The journal said a few results in the study by Gopal Kundu and team were digitally faked. The team had claimed the experiments were a repeat of another study they did in 2004.

India's scientific community stands split on the row.While the G Padmanabhan committee set up by nccs to investigate the matter has given the clean chit to the researchers, ngos like the Society for Scientific Values (ssv) say the issue is a blot on the scientific community; hence demands a serious debate on the authenticity and ethics of scientific research experiments in India. Bad practices The matter was first reported by a former nccs student and an internal inquiry was ordered by the centre which held Kundu and his team guilty. According to ssv, Kundu had even confessed to the error before the internal panel. But Padmanabhan and a few other senior scientists gave Kundu the clean chit. "After examining the original experiments, we found no manipulations,' the committee said.

In August 2006, S C Modak, formerly with the University of Pune, took the issue to ssv. He asked it to look into the matter. ssv's investigation has found data in the two papers were manipulated. "In research, some unforeseen errors may creep in. We found exact repetition of errors in two sets of experiments and same pixel densities in the digitalised images,' says an ssv official. "The researchers wanted to show they detected various proteins in cancer cells by matching them with antibodies. For this, they took pictures of the same experiment in different intensities of light and showed them as of separate experiments. They turned the pictures by 180