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The American Journal of Bioethics 2.4 (2002) 61-62



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Responsible Conduct of Research Is All Well and Good

Kenneth A. Richman,
Bryn Mawr College

Arri Eisen and Roberta M. Berry (2002) bring our attention to a set of questions that thoughtful educators in the biomedical sciences will be pondering as they work to comply with the letter and spirit of impending federal requirements for ethics training. A main theme is rejection of the ghettoization of ethics in graduate bioscience curricula. The arguments used in support of "the integration into science curricula of formal ethics training" are primarily based on the claim that "the consequences of ethical failures are too visible, costly, offensive, and potentially threatening to the surrounding community to be overlooked" (Eisen and Berry). Eisen and Berry emphasize the character of bioscience as a profession with its own norms and an established structure of mentoring.

Many who teach humanities subjects to undergraduates are familiar with the perils of putting subjects such as writing and "critical thinking" into their own academic neighborhoods. Anecdotes abound about students who, having passed Expository Writing 101, demand to know why their professor for The Victorian Novel "took points off" for sentence fragments and other infractions that to the student seem to be mere matters of taste. ("You didn't tell us that we needed paragraphs. This isn't expos!") Integration of ethics widely construed into the training of bioscience students, including making ethics instruction and modeling of ethical standards part and parcel of the mentoring process, is precisely what is needed to minimize the compartmentalization of ethics as something foreign to science itself.

This is not fully appreciated by Gordon and Parsi (2002). Offering or even requiring "at least one ethics course" is very far from what is needed for ethics education to be "firmly integrated" into a curriculum. When we ask "When will students take these [ethics] courses?" as Gordon and Parsi do, we are heading down the wrong path. Integration of ethics education into the bioscience curriculum requires that many courses already offered, including courses with titles like Advanced Topics in Biochemistry, address ethical issues in some way. This may require a big change for some science instructors. It could begin with an institutional review board member instructing for one or two class sessions or the introduction of an informed-consent process into a lab assignment. This is one area in which faculty at large research universities can often learn from their colleagues at small liberal arts colleges (Richman and Alexander n.d.).

Eisen and Berry's main argument is summed up in the following sentence: "The core ethos [of scientific research] is key to doing good bioscience research, and good research is key to fulfilling the social function of the profession." This suggests that promoting the core ethos of science is important for reasons outside of science itself—that is, for social reasons. While some human-subjects issues do arise only out of concern for social and individual interests, it would be better to motivate scientists to ethical behavior by emphasizing reasons internal to science.

When Eisen and Berry connect the core ethos of science to "doing good bioscience research" and write that "research ethics is good for research," they are (perhaps purposefully) being ambiguous. Are they talking about doing things in a way that is ethically good (at least permissible), or are they talking about doing science well? There is a wonderful truth in this ambiguity: the key to doing good in science is doing science well. Research that presents unjustified conclusions as if they were justified is unethical because it is bad science. This covers some (although not all) human subjects issues as well—it is ethically impermissible to use human subjects in research that will not yield knowledge, and it is impermissible to draw broad conclusions from an unrepresentative sample. The connection between research done well and research that done good is one of the most important lessons of Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982). Presenting research ethics with this emphasis promises to...

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