Warren wrote:
> My audience in this class is comprised of all graduate students.
> A diverse group...many are biochemistry and molecular biologists
> Some dentists, MDs and Epidemiology students. Most are working
> on some sort of research project of their own. Some were not
> aware of the NIH certification for studying human subjects. I
> would hope that they would be interested in Ethics...but I do
> find that many researchers have a little bit of resentment towards
> Review Boards and funding agencies concerning Ethical issues.
And unsurprisingly so... it is not always easy for the student to see
why many jurisdictions will permit an agency working for a political
party to phone them in the middle of their dinnertime to ask a set of
loaded questions without so much as a by-your-leave, or allow a grocery
store chain to use "regular customer" cards to collect detailed data
about purchases from customers, but will not permit a scientist to so
much as ask a volunteer their age and weight without careful and
time-consuming approval by a committee.
While nobody has unlimited license to gather data in a way harmful to
the subject, the academic researcher works under a unique reversed
burden of proof. Society today permits people to be subjected to far
more inconvenience, embarrassment, stress, or physical danger in the
interests of profit or entertainment than in the interests of knowledge,
no matter how valuable.
Can you imagine "Fear Factor", "Candid Camera", or a boxing match being
approved as psychological experiments, even supposing some genuine
benefit to be expected? Many jurisdictions claim that no prisoner can
give informed consent to any experiment, no matter how harmless or how
genuine the desire to help the greater good; but the validity of
"consent" to work for $4 per day for a private
contractor is rarely questioned.
A psychologist studying emotions told me a few years ago that these
days they are more or less expected to study anger, fear, sorrow, etc.
without making people (even volunteers) angry, afraid, or sad; instead
they ask their subjects to imagine themselves in these states (!).
Theaters and movies make millions by inducing these emotions in people,
with no requirement to prove ahead of time that the artistic merit of
the piece justifies the disturbance to the viewer (after all, that would
be censorship).
Philosophers, historians, and religious leaders tell us that we are all
capable of evil, and that many of us would indeed do terrible things
under sufficient pressure from society or an authority figure. It is
understood that it is good for us to know and believe these things.
However, experiments demonstrating this are today considered to be
"unethical" precisely because the subject would learn this about
him/herself.
And yet this is not (somebody sit on the cynic back there!) a society
that holds science in unique contempt - whatever a visitor from Mars or
the 19th century might think. Unless one knows something of the history
of medical experimentation, eugenics, etc. in the 20th century, and the
once-common abuses, it is hard to understand these paradoxes. This on
its own would justify some teaching of the history of the disciplines in
question.
-Robert Dawson
Disclaimer: I'm a mathematician. They let me do just about anything to
triangles...
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