A single idiot judge has guaranteed that in our country's next time of need when disaster strikes that the thunder we hear will be coming of from the feet of world class scientists running away for cover to protect the scientific process, their privacy and proprietary data.
I will confess to an enthusiastic fondness for Woods Hole and its amazing scientists long before BP turned the Gulf into their personal potty but anyone who cares about the contributions that science can make when we face disaster should be utterly horrified at this ugly legal turn of events.
June 4, 2012
BP has subpoenaed the private emails of scientists who studied the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe, stoking fears of misinformation campaigns and researcher intimidation.
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On the same day, WHOI oceanographers Christopher Reddy and Richard Camilli announced in a Boston Globe commentary that they’d given to BP 3,000 confidential emails requested by the company in December 2011.
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'Pulling academics and researchers into litigation ... will have a chilling effect on how science is conducted.'According to WHOI, the implications of BP’s demands, which extended to “any transmission or exchange of any information, whether orally or in writing, including without limitation any conversation or discussion,” are twofold.
As scientists’ personal communications — especially the back-and-forth, give-and-take, off-the-cuff devils’ advocacy and informal discussion essential to scientific deliberation — are taken out of context, confusion will almost surely follow.
Remarks that are part of an argument will be turned into categorical statements or otherwise misrepresented, as happened after the 2009 leak of climate scientist emails. Transparency could turn to opacity.
Another possibility, one that may resonate long after the Deepwater Horizon fallout has settled, is caution and wariness among researchers. The possibility of subpoena and digital interrogation may dissuade scientists from studying future disasters and could influence how they think and communicate.
Please click through and read every word that Woods Hole scientists, Christopher Reddy and Richard Camilli have shared in this op-ed. Woods Hole came to the aid of the country and BP in a time of terrible crisis. Now they are being punished with invasion of their privacy, tampering with the scientific process and possible theft of Woods Hole proprietary data.
It is truly frightening that there are no laws to protect the scientists and science in such dire circumstances.
Science out of context - Opinion - The Boston Globe
JUNE 03, 2012
Late last week, we reluctantly handed over more than 3,000 confidential e-mails to BP, as part of a subpoena from the oil company demanding access to them because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster lawsuit brought by the US government. We are accused of no crimes, nor are we party to the lawsuit. We are two scientists at an academic research institution who responded to requests for help from BP and government officials at a time of crisis.
Because there are insufficient laws and legal precedent to shield independent scientific researchers, BP was able to use the federal courts to gain access to our private information. Although the presiding judge magistrate recognized the need to protect confidential e-mails to avoid deterring future research, she granted BP’s request.
It is the lack of legal protection that has us concerned.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster caused the death of 11 people and spilled oil at an unprecedented depth of nearly a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. That deep-sea environment was aqua incognita to the oil industry and federal responders, but a familiar neighborhood for us at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. BP and Coast Guard officials asked for our help to assess the disaster, and we obliged.
We responded by leading on-site operations using robotic submersibles equipped with advanced technologies that we had developed for marine science. We applied them to measure the rate of fluid release from the well and to sample fluids from within the well. We then volunteered our professional time to scrutinize this data and published two peer-reviewed studies in a respected scientific journal. We determined an average flow rate of 57,000 barrels of oil per day and calculated a total release of approximately 4.9 million barrels.
BP claimed that it needed to better understand our findings because billions of dollars in fines are potentially at stake. So we produced more than 50,000 pages of documents, raw data, reports, and algorithms used in our research — everything BP would need to analyze and confirm our findings. But BP still demanded access to our private communications. Our concern is not simply invasion of privacy, but the erosion of the scientific deliberative process.
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A byproduct of the order to hand over our e-mails is that BP now has access to the intellectual property attached to the e-mails, including advanced robotic navigation tools and sub-sea surveillance technologies that have required substantial research investment by our laboratories and have great economic value to marine industries such as offshore energy production. The court provides no counterbalancing legal assistance to verify that BP or its affiliates do not infringe on our property rights. Although there is a confidentiality agreement that BP is subject to, the burden is left entirely to us, a single academic research organization, to police the use of our intellectual property by one of the largest corporations in the world.
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Christopher Reddy and Richard Camilli are scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Drs. Avery and Madin speak for me. It is well worth remembering the dearth of scientists that were in the Gulf after the Macondo blew. Woods Hole was one of the first on the scene and they did highly commendable work. Think WHOI will be so quick to respond next time? Think scientific institutions of equal caliber will be willing to pitch in?
Statement on the Need to Protect the Scientific Deliberative Process : Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Statement on the Need to Protect the Scientific Deliberative Process
Dr. Susan K. Avery, President and Director
Dr. Laurence P. Madin, Director of Research
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
A situation has arisen involving scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) that should concern all those who value the principles of academic freedom and responsibility, and believe these principles to be essential to the integrity of the deliberative scientific process.
Today, Sunday June 3, the Boston Globe published an opinion piece by Drs. Christopher Reddy and Richard Camilli about WHOI’s court-ordered production of documents in the Deepwater Horizon litigation. We offer here a fuller account of these events, and our view of what is at stake for WHOI, scientists in the United States, and society at large. What concerns us is the erosion of the academic freedom to “…remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate…” without being subject to subpoena or investigation as recognized and protected by the law going back to the 1957 Supreme Court decision, Sweezy vs New Hampshire. In Sweezy, the Supreme Court stood up to protect the freedoms of academic debate, thought, and lecture in holding, “Freedom to reason and freedom for disputation on the basis of observation and experiment are the necessary conditions for the advancement of scientific knowledge.” Unlike Sweezy, we are not facing the challenges of academics during the Communist red scare; however, the threat of litigation stifling scientific deliberation is real and troubling.
...Over the course of the spill, nearly 100 WHOI researchers, marine crew, and staff provided technical support and conducted measurements and research at the site of the spill and in the affected areas of the Gulf. Their work included measuring the flow rate and sampling the oil from the well’s failed blowout preventer, searching for and mapping a large underwater oil plume, tracking the ocean currents in the affected areas, examining the distribution and fate of dispersants underwater, and assessing the effects of the spill on coastal and deep-water ecosystems. WHOI scientists and engineers continue to do important research in the Gulf in the aftermath of this spill. The Institution is immensely proud of our staff for their dedication, skill, and willingness to assist in a time of national crisis.
At the request of the U.S. Coast Guard, WHOI scientists Camilli and Reddy led operations using WHOI-developed technology to measure the rate at which fluids flowed out of the damaged well and to obtain a direct sample of the well’s fluids. Subsequently, these researchers and their colleagues, largely on their own time, analyzed the data they collected and published two peer-reviewed studies in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.1,2 They determined a flow rate of 57,000 barrels of oil per day, which was used to calculate a total release of approximately 4.9 million barrels.
In December 2011, WHOI was subpoenaed by lawyers representing BP in response to lawsuits brought against the oil company by the U.S. government, fishermen, workers, and residents injured by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It is important to note that WHOI is not a party to the lawsuit. BP claimed in its subpoena that it needed information to better understand scientific findings by Camilli, Reddy, and others related to the flow rate measurements they made at the Macondo well. Cleanwater Act violation fines that will be levied on BP may be based in great measure on the amount of oil released; therefore, billions of dollars are at stake.
As was stated in the Globe op-ed, WHOI turned over everything BP would need to analyze and confirm or refute the findings. However, BP demanded more—the scientists’ email communications, notes, and manuscript drafts: “…any transmission or exchange of any information, whether orally or in writing, including without limitation any conversation or discussion…” concerning the research. WHOI, through our lawyers at Goodwin Procter, challenged this demand, but on April 20, the magistrate judge ordered the institution to produce the vast majority of its deliberative work. On June 1, WHOI turned over the last of more than 3,500 emails and associated documents to BP.
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While transparency to provide adequate information to reproduce scientific results is an important principle, this situation poses a serious danger to the scientific process. It threatens to facilitate misinterpretation of scientific findings by highlighting preliminary evaluations and opinions, conflating facts with assumptions, and implying conclusions without a valid scientific process or review. Even worse, pulling academics and researchers into litigation they are not a party to will have a chilling effect on how science is conducted. The essence of the scientific process is rigorous deliberation in which scientists examine, question, test, reject, and modify ideas as they work toward a verifiable conclusion. Without adequate legal protection, researchers and their institutions may reasonably fear that their deliberative process can be attacked and their intellectual property exposed, or that they will become entrained in litigation to which they are not parties and where they are unlikely to derive any benefit. As a consequence, scientists may feel forced to curtail, censor or avoid the normal deliberative process. In future emergencies, particularly those that might give rise to litigation, researchers may be more reluctant to volunteer expertise and technology.
The materials that BP demanded may include intellectual property, hard won by the researchers. While there are protections that can be placed by the court and through confidentiality orders, experts in the litigant parties receiving these materials may obtain insight into the creation of this intellectual property and be able to replicate it for their own programs even if they do not directly take it. It is unlikely that institutions such as WHOI would be able to identify or prosecute this infringement of intellectual property rights.
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