Responsible Conduct in Data Management
 
  Title: Learning Disabled and Drugged Scenario
   

Characters: Dr. William Burgess, a Researcher
                      Dr. Eunice Lee, his Colleague
                      Jasmine Chandler, Graduate Research Assistant

INTERIOR, DAY. RESEARCH INSTITUTE, A LARGE ROOM WITH MANY PAPERS SPREAD AROUND

Jasmine is sorting lab reports into appropriate piles, one pile per subject. Dr.Burgess is writing on a legal pad. Lee is working a spreadsheet .

JASMINE
Dr. Burgess, what's the name of subject twelve? The teenager who lives at Quinnipiac Terrace?

DR.BURGESS
Larry Joiner.

JASMINE
That's the kid who plays soccer, right? Not the kid with the ferrets.

DR.BURGESS
No, the kid with the ferrets lives in West Haven .

JASMINE
The guy at the lab spelled his name wrong, but the address is right.

DR.BURGESS
How did he spell it?

JASMINE
With a “y”.

DR.BURGESS
”J-o-y-n-e-r”?

JASMINE
”y-n-O-r”

DR.BURGESS
Carelessness! One person was reading the names and another one was copying them onto specimen labels.

JASMINE
But we can still use it, right?

DR.BURGESS
Sure, there's only one subject at Quinnipiac Terrace.

LEE
You know, you wouldn't have to be Sherlock Homes to figure out the identities of about half our subjects. I mean, how many learning disabled, potential substance abusers are there? Once you know where they live, their ages and what their hobbies are… a few inquiries around the schoolyard or the pool hall and anybody could put two and two together.

DR.BURGESS
Which makes it all the more important to keep even the numerically-identified profiles confidential.

JASMINE
I lock all the folders in the safe every night.

LEE
But look how easy it was for you guys to figure out! Once we reveal age, gender and neighborhood in the published study, everyone will know who we mean.

DR.BURGESS
We could name the neighborhood without naming it.

JASMINE
”A public housing project with a high incidence of substance abuse…”

LEE
Which, for anybody who knows New Haven , means “Quinnipiac Terrace.”

DR.BURGESS
How are they going to know it's New Haven ?

LEE
Because it's a Yale Study.

JASMINE
Duh.

LEE
The real problem is in all the supplementary data you insisted on collecting – hobbies, education level, SES, census tract – you publish that stuff and you might as well tell all the learning disabled substance-abusers in New Haven County that we're blowing the whistle on them.

JASMINE
You'd have to blow it pretty loud.

LEE
This is no laughing matter. The protocol, the protocol which we've got now – virtually precludes confidentiality – when we've promised confidentiality.

DR.BURGESS
So…

JASMINE
Lawsuit time!

LEE
The only solution is to throw out all the supplementary data. Forget we ever collected it. “Learning disabled substance abuser” – period.

DR.BURGESS
Some of the most interesting and potentially valuable issues in the study depend on the supplementary data.

LEE
Our ability to do future studies in this community depends on our respecting patient privacy.

JASMINE
Yeah, the lawyers…

DR.BURGESS
What if we kept the protocol, but expanded the subject pool? Fifty learning disabled subjects and fifty non-learning disabled subjects?

JASMINE
Uh -- do we have the budget for that?