Ethical Research

Thinking about research integrity and remembering a leader

A new seminar series on mentoring and the responsible conduct of research will honor the leadership and vision of University Distinguished Professor Hans Kende who died September 26, 2006.

Karen Klomparens, dean of the Graduate School, and VP Gray established the series that will draw nationally renowned speakers to MSU. “When we asked Hans’s wife Gabi for permission to name the seminar series for him, she was thrilled that we wanted to remember him in this way,” Klomparens says.

The Kende Lecture Series will consist of three or four programs during each of the next two academic years. The programs will focus on the importance of research integrity, Klomparens says. “We want the series to challenge faculty, students, and postdoctoral trainees to think broadly about the implications of conducting research in a public university with responsibility to research colleagues internationally.”

Topics will reflect Kende’s commitment to conducting research responsibly and to mentoring students and young faculty. In April 2003 he agreed to serve as chair of a task force charged to assess the mentoring being provided to MSU’s graduate students and make recommendations for best mentoring practices.

“After a couple of meetings of the task force, he called me,” Klomparens recalls. “He had found that different disciplines have different approaches to graduate education. But because of who he was and the joy he found in learning, he went to work with enthusiasm to understand the variety of cultures among the departments. And he was very skillful at getting that diverse group to pull together and develop guidelines that would work across disciplines,” she adds.

Within a year, the task force produced two sets of guidelines, one for graduate student advising and mentoring relationships and one for integrity in research and creative activities. University Graduate Council members voted to endorse the report and an additional four recommendations in February 2004. In March 2004, Faculty Council approved the full package (see “Improving Graduate Education” at grad.msu.edu).

Kende joined the MSU Plant Research Laboratory in 1965 as one of its first nine faculty members. His distinguished career as a plant biologist included election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Natural Scientists. He served as mentor to more than sixty graduate students and postdoctoral research associates. His lab was known as a place where, as one student put it, researchers learned not to take themselves too seriously while taking their research very seriously.

Details about the Kende Lecture Series will be announced next month and will be available on Web sites of the Graduate School and the OVPRGS.

Ethics on the frontiers of genetics research

Advances in genetics often raise thorny ethical questions: think of cloning, stem cells, and gene therapy. MSU genetics researchers, wanting to maintain the trust of the public and their peers and looking for ethical guidance as their research takes them into uncharted areas, have a new resource. The Genetics Sciences Ethics Advisory Committee (GSEAC) expects to begin meeting this fall. Paul B. Thompson, Kellogg Professor in Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics, has agreed to chair the committee.

GSEAC does not serve a regulatory function, Thompson says. With its experts from within and outside MSU, it will serve as a kind of sounding board for genetics researchers or administrators seeking advice on ethical issues related to genetics research. GSEAC will respond to questions with advisory briefing papers drawing on the expertise of committee members and their studies of the issue.

“Federal, state, and university regulations address many of the issues associated with genetics research,” Thompson says. “But research, by its nature, pushes the frontiers, where there may not be much ethical guidance available. GSEAC will help fill that void.”

The committee includes members recruited from outside MSU.