Dartmouth Receives Funding For Two Projects To Teach Science Ethics

Two government agencies have granted Dartmouth College nearly $445,000 to organize a curriculum and develop a course plan designed to teach budding scientists about research ethics. The designers of the project anticipate that the educational materials, once they are published, will be used by other schools developing similar programs. The Dartmouth effort consists of two distinct projects organized by the school's Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics. Both the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Education have provided the funding. A $219,777 grant from the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) is going to a three-year study to create a model interdisciplinary graduate seminar on ethics and academic research to begin next year. Areas of discussion in the class will include research methodology, professional honesty, reporting on research, whistle-blowing and loy- alty, human experimentation, and animal experimentation. Deni Elliott, director of the Ethics Institute at the Hanover, N.H., school, hopes this course will be sought after and implemented by other science departments throughout the United States. NSF's Ethics and Value Studies Program is providing the money for the other project, which will create curriculum materials for undergraduate and graduate studies over two years. The result will be the creation of a number of small books containing moral guidelines and government regulations, as well as a collection of new essays concerning ethics in academic research. At the completion of the project, they are to be published as a series of inexpensive volumes by the University Press of New England. The purpose of the books, called "modules" by the project's developers, is to aid in discussion of ethical issues and not to dictate any absolute "right" answer. "The modules are not intended to be the Ten Commandments of research ethics," says Rachelle Hollander, program director of NSF's Ethics and Value Studies. "They are intended to bring together the kinds of thinking and range of opinions that have been brought to bear on important issues in these areas," she says. "We hope the modules will enable faculty and students to begin to deliberate and decide for themselves what they think the range of acceptable behavior in a particular case should be." In addition to the pure educational benefit, Dartmouth's Elliott says, the projects will help her school to meet requirements mandated by the National Institutes of Health concerning ethics education. In 1989, NIH decreed that in order to receive federal training grants--stipends made to institutions for the educational support of individual postdoctoral and graduate students--they must receive some instruction in laboratory morality and scientific ethics (Robin Eisner, The Scientist, Oct. 28, 1991, page 1). Elliott says that, unlike similar ethics programs in other schools, the two projects will involve scientists and philosophers working in tandem to probe the ethical questions. "The first step in applied ethics is consciousness-raising," Elliott says. "For us, that will be getting philosophers and scientists to share a common language and talk about morally relevant issues and what constitutes ethical problems. "Through this kind of cooperation, we can develop sensible criteria by which scientists in the lab can determine what kinds of practices are moral, and which are not." The philosophers possess the analytical tools to talk about morality, says Elliott, while the scientists have practical knowledge and experience concerning the realities of laboratory research. Yet, once a student reaches the graduate level in academic science, is it still possible to teach that individual to be moral? Dartmouth biology professor Ed Berger, an adviser on the two ethics projects, suggests that it is. But he says studying science ethics is more complicated than learning simple rights and wrongs. "We're not talking about things that are easy to identify and shake your finger at: don't kill, don't hurt, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal," Berger says. "In a laboratory, 90 percent of the situations that arise are not so clear-cut. Science is a set of conventions. So we need to work through difficult circumstances with a formal moral theory. "Through these projects, we are arguing that a scientist has to learn about ethics the same way he learns the structure of DNA. Somebody has to teach you what the discipline is about in order for you to become any good at it." Because the sheltering atmosphere of laboratory work often distances scientists from many kinds of humanistic concerns, it is important to formally advise researchers on ways to think about important ethical issues, says Frederick Bonkovsky, the acting chief of the National Institutes of Health's Bioethics Program. "One finds that scientists simply haven't thought about ethical matters a lot," he says. "Scientists generally want to be ethical and moral, and when given the opportunity to confront these issues, they generally do a good job. But it does take a concerted effort to get ethics on the agenda." The NIH Bioethics Program at Bethesda, Md., is well into its second decade, advising researchers and institutional review boards at the institute about values questions con- cerning human subjects. Bonkovsky says that in his experience, he has rarely seen a case in which ethical answers are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong, so education is important. "For example, even the Nazi doctors who did experiments on humans had reasons to think those experiments were valid. So what we would consider pretty bad still has some gray areas involved," he says. "We need to teach scientists how to identify and reflect critically on questions having to do with values and ethics."

Dartmouth Receives Funding For Two Projects To Teach Science Ethics

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