Dr. William J. Gartland, Jr. 
January 29, 1982 
Page five 
claims. First, it is claimed that the knowledge and skill is 
special and laymen cannot evaluate it; second, professionals 
are responsible and can be trusted to work ethically without 
supervision; third, the profession can be trusted to take 
regulatory action if one of its members acts improperly. 
Science can be distinguished from other professions by 
the intensely competive environment of research, as well as 
by its lack of a def ined client group. In science, only one 
solution is available for a given problem. In business, 
markets can be expanded or new ones created; in law, no 
other lawyer is competing with the lawyer retained by the 
client to achieve a resolution of the client's problems. 
In science, no scientist has a monopoly on a line of research. 
As Gaston notes, "Competition in science is more like a race 
between runners in the same track and over the same distance 
at the same time." 
Scientists in industry are usually seen as a professional 
subgroup. Since their incentives are more clearly determined 
by commitment to the industrial employer, their contribution 
to scientific knowledge is considered secondary to academic 
scientists, for reasons relating to the higher prestige of 
academic employment and the tension between employer demands 
and professional orientation in the industrial setting. 
Academic science has been seen as the paradigm for pure 
science, although it is apparent that most scientific areas 
have substantial and deepening industrial connections, and 
the great majority of scientists earn their living in tech- 
nical work. Given the pressure to produce in an expanding 
field, recent evidence suggests that violations of scientific 
norms have occurred with increasing frequency in both academia 
and industry. 
Originality is prized in science insofar as it demonstrates 
an important feature of the natural world for the first time. 
In crowded, "hot" fields, such as biology, competition tends 
to be particularly intense and tensions greater. With such 
intense competition, competitive behaviors may result that 
tend to evade, or violate, the norms of science, such as 
hasty publication, fraud or theft and secretiveness. The pi- 
rating of papers and falsification of data has become more 
visible in recent years, as major cases of cheating in the 
bio-medical area have emerged. Disruption of informal scien- 
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