Research ethics topic of Graduate College Lecture

By Josh Holderbaum
Western Herald

Marissa Ingle/Western Herald Nicholas H. Steneck Ph.D and University of Michigan history professor spoke on Sept. 10 for a graduate lecture. He spoke on: "How Governments have Addressed Ethics in Research."

For all the research that goes on in America, one lecturer thinks the rules and regulations need to be greatly revised before science can advance.
Nicholas H. Steneck, Ph.D. and University of Michigan history professor emeritus, lectured on “How Governments Have Addressed Ethics in Research” yesterday in the Fetzer Center’s Putney Auditorium.

Steneck has worked as a medieval historian at UM specializing in the history of science, UM’s historian, and leader of responsible conduct research at the National Science Foundation.
Steneck painted a grim picture of how the U.S. government handles research dilemmas.

“Governments address ethical issues in three ways: reluctantly, slowly and after the fact,” Steneck said. “Things that were issues in the 1940s were addressed in the 1980s and need to be revisited now.”

Steneck presented research dilemmas over time as a timeline, starting with early problems in the 1940s about human experimentation practiced in Nazi Germany and Japan, leading to the creation of the Nuremburg Principles.

“For almost all other documents, no other document is as good as a starting point,” Steneck said of the document. “The downside is the Nuremburg served as a guideline, it had no clout. We said, ‘The Nazis did that during World War II, we wouldn’t do that.’ Well, we did [violate the Principles].”

Afterwards, the scientists themselves solved many ethical dilemmas in science, with governments following in their stead and adopting their measures.
Scientists responded most vigorously during the late 1950s and 1960s regarding animals used in research, eventually ending in animals being treated on the same level as humans, but also opened more ethical doors.

“Within every process there are smaller ethical dilemmas,” Steneck said. “What is an animal? What’s a humane way to euthanize an animal? Studies show a rat brain keeps going after it dies, so it can still feel pain. So we can’t decapitate a rat.”

Over the years, government regulation of science came later and later. Eventually to the point that the government created agencies to stop ethical misconduct missed many cases, with government oversight limited to falsification, fabrication and plagiarism.

Steneck wants to see the differentiating between private and industry research and the balance of power and decision-making revisited by government at some point, but realizes the public often isn’t well informed.

“The public likes astronomy and wooly mammoths,” Steneck said.

“The public does have the power to say we don’t like this we don’t want to fund it anymore, but if some of these things were left up to a public vote I’d be scared. We definitely need better science education.”

But at the same time, researchers and companies need to keep their own interests in check, he said.

“Usually we [do research] for prestige but we also do it for raising money,” Steneck said. “We do it because it helps the public and it helps ourselves, but we do it mainly because it helps ourselves.”

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Posted by heraldstaff on Sep 17 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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