BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XVII

Integrating Ethics into Scientific Training

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about.

Scenario: The bioethics section of my lab meeting opens with a copy of an e-mail from Professor Braga from the Universi-dad de Granada, who has written with disturbing news. “A few days ago, while I was reviewing a manuscript on the coralline red algae from the Miocene of Egypt by [Professor M.M.I.], I realized that two of the micrographs illustrating the ‘Egyptian’ algae [were] pictures of Pliocene algae from Cadiz (Spain) published by Aguirre et al. (1993) and that another was a picture of an alga from the Miocene of the Vienna basin published by Aguirre et al. (1996).” In the subsequent days, there was a firestorm of e-mail traffic as the paleoalgal community debated what to do about this ongoing fraud that was traced back decades in the literature. This international group found many, many instances of scientific fraud by the same author in which species and strata were altered with abandon. I asked my lab group what they would advocate in this situation. One student said he would do nothing and stuck to his guns during our ensuing debate.

Faced with ethical issues myself, both substantive and trivial over the years, I now elect to spend 15–20 minutes of precious lab meeting time debating bioethical issues of particular import to scientists. If there is an overarching motto here, it is “Be prepared”! Seriously, this training was not part of my graduate and postgraduate education, but I have come to think that it is important to a successful career for several reasons:

• The consequences of not knowing the legal and political ramifications of bioethical issues are significant.
• Advance awareness of possible problems will save much time and anguish during your career.
• Knowledge of your rights, the rights of others, and the structure that supports those rights is paramount in navigating the waters once you find yourself in them.

We use the Hastings Center Model (http://www.cs.bgsu.edu/maner/heuristics/1990HastingsCenter.htm) as a framework for 15–20 minutes’ worth of discussion of a specific bioethical issue to wrap up our weekly lab meetings. We take material from these columns, e-mail traffic, newspapers, journals, real-life events (preferably current ones)—in short any source we can. I try to organize these materials into themes (issues of authorship, scientific misconduct, etc.) so that a given theme spans a few weeks at a time. We silently read a scenario I have previously written on an overhead screen (two to four minutes). We then break into groups of two or three and cover the issue(s) posed by the scenario (five to seven minutes). This structure ensures that no one can “hide” (i.e., fail to form and express their own opinion) during the conversation. We come back together as a group and share the mini-group conversations (remaining minutes). I try not to truncate the discussion before it naturally winds down but am mindful of the duration of the conversation so that lab meeting is not overly long. As everyone is leaving, if we have used a “Bioethics Imperative” column from the ASPB News as a basis of discussion, I hand out copies of the full column as food for thought. I also post hard copies of articles from the news and e-mail as an additional way to engender debates.

Our debates have ranged from cool and dispassionate to heated and emotional. We have covered topics from authorship to the political impacts of genetically modified organisms in medicine, ecology, and food production and distribution. All are not equally engaged in every debate, but over time each person has been sparked by one issue or another. Some folk new to the lab initially do not see the point, labeling these exercises “trivial” or “a waste of time,” but graduates of the lab often phone or write me spontaneously after an interview or after witnessing a conflict to thank me profusely for the training that these debates have provided. Apparently, they are finding that long after their science from my lab is published, the principles of these discussions remain in place and are of lasting value. An added bonus is that these meetings are a great way for me to learn about my lab members and about bioethics at the same time—I always learn something from my students.

So what happened after the student in my lab meeting replied that he would do nothing about the blatant fraud in the scenario? The rest of the lab, from undergraduates on up, vociferously took him to task and hammered out how to elevate the international flow of information from rumor to structured, ethical handling of what they perceived as a fouling of the literature. My job that afternoon was to keep the lid on things and shoo everyone out before dark. I grinned all the way home.

P.S. See the top two links in http://www.ku.edu/~ifaa/n-The_Archives-reports.html#Reports. A related web site is http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/ BadScience.html.

Next time: Government policies and consequences in bioethical issues.

Dina Mandoli
mandoli@u.washington.edu