Tim van Opijnen | We scientists must follow the rules. Why doesn’t the U.S. government?
Professor Tim van Opijnen is required to undergo all kinds of training in the United States on what he is and isn’t allowed to do as a scientist. But why don’t such strict ethical rules apply to others, such as the U.S. government? “The president knows perfectly well which fence needs to come down to make bribery no longer a problem.”
Sometime around my first month as a postdoc at Tufts University in 2006, my group moved into a freshly renovated laboratory. It had beautiful unspoiled benches, new instruments and big windows that looked out over Boston’s Chinatown.
But the building had a history. Everyone knew the space had once belonged to William Douglas. In 1983 the anatomist had paid for his relationship with a young woman who worked as a prostitute in Boston’s ‘Combat Zone’, using money he embezzled from Tufts. She disappeared that March. Her body was never found, but her blood-stained car turned up in New York, and he went to prison for manslaughter.
I am sure Douglas did not need a workshop to know that what he did was wrong. These days, as a professor, I must complete a long list of training sessions, some on subtler matters, others simply to make clear what is and is not allowed. The list grows a little longer every year. There are workshops on research ethics, biosafety, conflicts of interest (COI) and mentoring, endless online videos to sit through and PowerPoint presentations to click along with.
In one of them, John offers Amanda $1,000 for access to patient data, and we are asked whether that is okay (answer: it is not). I complain about all of it, mostly silently, as does everyone I know. But I once worked in a space where, long before me, someone followed no rule at all, not even the most obvious ones. So I understand why we put those fences up and would not tear any of them down.
Stifling freedom
Take mentoring. As a developing scientist at the UvA and later in the US, I was allowed to explore whatever I found interesting, and I found everything interesting. So when I started my own lab I gave my students the same freedom and assumed they would use it as hungrily as I had. Instead, some barely showed up, because without deadlines the work seemed not to matter, and others froze, because with so many possible experiments every choice felt like the wrong one. My mentoring instinct was a record of my own history, and gradually I learned that each student needs a personalized approach.
Today we have mentoring workshops to shorten that learning curve. The standard for mentoring, running a lab and conducting research has risen since I was a student. At my latest workshop, a room full of Harvard professors and doctors swapped stories about situations that each of us had handled wrongly despite the best of intentions, and sharing those stories in the end makes us better. Every day I answer for my students, my data, my funding and my conduct, and I would not want it any other way.
Over the limit
Murder, embezzlement and bribery are different. They are wrong in every era, and what matters is that someone is there to enforce the rules against them. That goes for any institution that lives on public money, from a university to a government.
In his new book Blockers, published this week, Michael Lewis describes how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searched the federal government for the people in its way and pushed them out. Among them were workers who guarded taxpayers’ data and made sure officials played by the rules. Either DOGE did this with premeditation, or it had no idea what it was doing. For the second possibility there is a principle called ‘Chesterton’s fence’: before you tear a fence down, be able to explain why it was put there. DOGE tore fences down left and right without asking, and the president is still at it.
For instance, in 2025 the president fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, and the office has been run by acting directors ever since, some of them Cabinet members, which is like letting a butcher inspect their own meat. And we all still remember him accepting a $400 million Boeing 747 ‘gift’ from Qatar. In my line of work, that is exactly $400 million over the limit of what my own COI agreements would make me declare, and it is called a bribe.
Trust without accountability
While filing my latest COI form, I wondered why I should bother if the rules do not apply to those at the top. The next day a colleague asked me the same thing, unprompted. The answer is that it is the right thing to do, and cheating never lasts, because sooner or later the experiment finds you out. I have seen strange things in my career: a student who ran a swingers’ site on university servers, a colleague I ran into in a basement hallway with a prostitute, and a scientist who fabricated results, the cardinal sin of science. All of them paid for it in one way or another.
A government that keeps the odds ever in its favor by firing the people whose job it is to hold it to account has arranged to pay nothing. Eventually, the rest of us will pay for it in a low-trust society, where everyone wonders why they should follow rules that nobody at the top follows.
