Ethics

When I was in grad school, we had to listen to an annual lecture that was ostensibly on ethics - things like not making up data or running a million regressions and then just cherry picking the few significant results.  It was incredibly painful because everyone knew management was systematically violating the the actual ethical code that we were all required to follow - 

The expression "basic ethical principles" refers to those general judgments that serve as a basic justification for the many particular ethical prescriptions and evaluations of human actions. Three basic principles, among those generally accepted in our cultural tradition, are particularly relevant to the ethics of research involving human subjects: the principles of respect of persons, beneficence and justice. 

1. Respect for Persons. -- Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy.
An autonomous person is an individual capable of deliberation about personal goals and of acting under the direction of such deliberation. To respect autonomy is to give weight to autonomous persons' considered opinions and choices while refraining from obstructing their actions unless they are clearly detrimental to others. To show lack of respect for an autonomous agent is to repudiate that person's considered judgments, to deny an individual the freedom to act on those considered judgments, or to withhold information necessary to make a considered judgment, when there are no compelling reasons to do so. (emphases added)  

Oh well, we all knew that Ewen Cameron had systematically violated the Nuremberg Code (despite having been a psychiatrist at Nuremberg) and that Maitland Baldwin had engaged in and facilitated all manner of heinous torture (despite being a scientific officer and branch chief at NIH), so the thoroughgoing hypocrisy wasn't surprising.

Of course, I've also heard utterly ridiculous defenses of such egregious ethical violations.  I once had someone actually claim that these basic ethical principles only apply to officially designated research studies and that people could safely commit atrocities otherwise, this despite the fact it had been repeatedly stressed that this ethical code was rooted in Kant's notion of the categorical imperative.  Even though this person had probably never read a word of Kant in their life they still felt supremely confident in arguing that the categorical imperative was not categorical!