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Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: Continuing Education in Research Ethics
- The American Journal of Bioethics
- The MIT Press
- Volume 2, Number 4, Fall 2002
- pp. 55-56
- Article
- Additional Information
The American Journal of Bioethics 2.4 (2002) 55-56
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Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks:
Continuing Education in Research Ethics
Richard R. Sharp,
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Baylor College of Medicine
Arri Eisen and Roberta M. Berry (2002) maintain that "continuing education in research ethics should become an integral part of the life of the practicing bioscientist." Ongoing training in research ethics can help clarify professional norms and obligations, improve the ability of researchers to recognize and appreciate the complexity of ethical issues in research, and encourage moral discourse among researchers. Having argued that formal training in research ethics is an important aspect of promoting moral reflection in the sciences, they then describe a number of strategies for integrating research ethics into the training of researchers.
Many of the pedagogical issues discussed by Eisen and Berry pertain to the training of researchers in the earliest stages of their professional development. If research ethics is to be meaningfully integrated into scientific practice, however, ongoing ethics instruction must reflect the full range of moral issues scientists face at various stages of their careers and should not be limited to issues of special concern to researchers-in-training.
This commentary extends the analysis offered by Eisen and Berry to include the teaching of research ethics to established professionals in the biosciences. Established researchers and researchers-in-training typically occupy very different positions of power and perform different roles in research. They also face different sets of professional demands and expectations. These differences have at least three implications for the teaching of research ethics to senior scientists.
First, because researchers encounter different ethical issues at different stages in their careers, effective ethics-training programs for senior researchers will emphasize different themes than those covered by instructional programs targeted to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other junior researchers. To illustrate this point, consider the protection of whistleblowers and how this topic might be explored in different ways with junior and senior researchers. Most textbooks in research ethics examine this topic in terms of how best to protect individuals who make accusations of scientific misconduct against potential retaliation by more powerful supervisors or administrators (e.g., see Resnick 1998). This is clearly an important moral dimension of such accusations, particularly for junior researchers, but there are other questions that might be asked regarding allegations of misconduct. Established researchers, for example, might be interested in how they ought to respond to false accusations of misconduct and the associated ethical dilemmas that face a falsely accused researcher. Similarly, researchers in supervisory positions might be interested in exploring how best to protect the whistleblower from himself or herself—for example, when the accuser fails to appreciate the potential impact of an accusation on his or her research career. These more subtle ethical issues rarely receive attention in textbooks but would likely be of much interest to senior researchers participating in ethics-training programs.
The more general point of this example, however, is that the ethical issues of most immediate relevance to senior researchers can differ from the topics of most concern to junior researchers. This point is further supported when one considers how the collaborative relationships one encounters at different stages of one's career affect the types of ethical issues that present themselves, how conflicts of interest and obligation change as one's professional responsibilities expand, and so forth. Defining appropriate topics and subtopics for an ethics training course will depend on the professional experience and research roles of the participants.
Second, because junior researchers and senior researchers perform different functions in research, ethics training programs for the two groups may serve different goals. Unlike their junior colleagues, for example, senior scientists are responsible for enhancing the professional development of the people they supervise. This mentoring includes developing a fuller understanding of professional norms of conduct among one's trainees. Thus, ethics training programs for senior researchers should aspire to "train the trainers" of junior scientists.
In addition, since the actions of established researchers help define and redefine acceptable...