SCIENCE, RESEARCH ETHICS OF

The idea that ethics is important in scientific research is not new. In 1830 Charles Babbage (1791–1871) admonished British scientists for engaging in dishonest research. In 1912 researchers discovered the fossil skull of a missing link between humans and apes at the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. After four decades of controversy, several scientists proved that the skull was a hoax.

At the beginning of World War II, prominent physicists believed that it was their moral obligation to help defeat Nazi Germany. Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) urging the United States to develop the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) directed the Manhattan Project, a $1 billion effort to build the first nuclear weapons. After the United States dropped two bombs on Japan in the summer of 1945, many scientists who worked on the bomb also led the Atoms for Peace movement, which helped to establish the International Atomic Energy Commission. During the Nuremberg Trials (1949–1949), the international community adopted a code of conduct for human experimentation, the Nuremberg Code (1947), in response to the horrific experiments on human subjects conducted by Nazi researchers at Nuremberg.

In 1961 Rachel Louise Carson (1907–1964) alerted the public to the toxic effects of the pesticide DDT on animal species and helped to launch the environmentalist movement. In 1966, Henry Knowles Beecher (1904–1976) published an article describing twenty-two ethically problematic medical experiments, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In this experiment, which took place from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, researchers withheld medical treatment from African American subjects with advanced syphilis, even after an effective treatment, penicillin, became available in the 1940s. The study continued until the media brought it to the public's attention in 1972, prompting Congress to hold hearings on biomedical research and adopt new laws pertaining to research on human subjects. In 1975, philosopher Peter Singer published a book that challenged the moral legitimacy of most experiments on animals and helped to energize the growing animal rights movement. In that same year scientists held a conference at Asilomar, California, on the risks of genetically engineered microorganisms.

Interest in the ethics of research increased dramatically in the mid-1980s due to at least two factors. First, there were many highly publicized allegations of data fabrication (making up data), falsification (changing data), and other unethical activities in federally funded research. Second, the academic research enterprise became much more commercialized due to changes in intellectual property laws and the expansion of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. In the 1980s, patent offices began awarding patents on many different biological products and processes, such as DNA, cell lines, and genetically modified organisms. The U.S. Congress also passed several laws encouraging the transfer of technology from the public to the private sector. In response to these changes in the law, universities began aggressively pursuing and protecting intellectual property. Academic researchers also took a greater interest in intellectual property and in forming start-up companies to commercialize new inventions and discoveries. The pharmaceutical industry increased its spending on research and development, and the biotechnology industry, which emerged in the late 1970s following the development of gene sequencing, splicing, and copying techniques, did the same. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, private industry accounted for more than sixty percent of all research and development expenditures in the United States.

As research became more commercialized, financial ties between academic and government scientists and private companies, for example, ownership of stock or patents and gifts or consulting arrangements, increased. These financial interests created a conflict of loyalties for scientists and universities and threatened the objectivity and trustworthiness of research. Scientists, ethicists, and journalists presented evidence that some researchers and private companies were biasing data analysis and interpretation, research design, and publication practices to produce results favorable to those companies. Financial interests (and pressures) in research also were linked to fabrication, falsification, and other ethical problems.

From the late-1980s to the early twenty-first century, many different organizations took steps to promote ethics in research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that all students on Public Health Service training grants and all intramural researchers receive instruction in responsible conduct of research. Universities incorporated ethics education into the graduate curriculum to meet NIH requirements and to minimize the risk of the legal liability and public embarrassment from ethical misconduct in research. The NIH and the National Science Foundation adopted a common definition of research misconduct as well as policies and procedures for investigating and adjudicating misconduct allegations. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published several reports concerning ethics in research. Many different professional organizations and scientific journals adopted or revised codes of conduct in research.

Research ethics has become multidisciplinary field of scholarship, education, and policy, encompassing the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Some of the key topics in the field include: the foundations of research ethics; ethical decision-making in research; recording, storing, and sharing data; honesty and objectivity in research; scientific misconduct; authorship and publication; collaboration; mentoring; intellectual property; ownership of research materials; conflicts of interest; diversity in science; research on human and animal subjects; research in genetics and biotechnology; scientific freedom; social responsibility in research; research funding; and legal and regulatory aspects of research.

See also Einstein, Albert; Philosophy of Social Sciences; Singer, Peter.

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David B. Resnik (2005)