what is the history of research ethics

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History of Research Ethics

This website is intended to give a brief description of the development of human subjects’ regulations and requirements in the United States. More in-depth coverage of this topic is available through Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative training.

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Nuremberg Code

A well-known chapter in the history of research with human subjects opened on Dec. 9, 1946, when an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among the charges were that German physicians conducted medical experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent. Most of the subjects of these experiments died or were permanently crippled as a result. As a direct result of the trial, the Nuremberg Code was established in 1948, stating that “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” making it clear that subjects should give consent and that the benefits of research must outweigh the risks. Although it did not carry the force of law, the Nuremberg Code was the first international document which advocated voluntary participation and informed consent.

Thalidomide

In the late 1950s, thalidomide was approved as a sedative in Europe; it was not approved in the United States by the FDA. The drug was prescribed to control sleep and nausea throughout pregnancy, but it was soon found that taking this drug during pregnancy caused severe deformities in the fetus. Many patients did not know they were taking a drug that was not approved for use by the FDA, nor did they give informed consent. Some 12,000 babies were born with severe deformities due to thalidomide. U.S. Senate hearings followed and in 1962 the so-called “Kefauver Amendments” to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act were passed into law to ensure drug efficacy and greater drug safety. For the first time, drug manufacturers were required to prove to the FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972)

An equally well-known chapter in history occurred during a research project conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service. Six hundred low-income African-American males, 400 of whom were infected with syphilis, were monitored for 40 years. Free medical examinations were given; however, subjects were not told about their disease. Even though a proven cure (penicillin) became available in the 1950s, the study continued until 1972 with participants being denied treatment. In some cases, when subjects were diagnosed as having syphilis by other physicians, researchers intervened to prevent treatment. Many subjects died of syphilis during the study. The study was stopped in 1973 by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare only after its existence was publicized and it became a political embarrassment. In 1997, under mounting pressure, President Clinton apologized to the study subjects and their families.

Declaration of Helsinki

In 1964, the World Medical Association established the “Declaration of Helsinki,” which provides recommendations guiding medical doctors in biomedical research involving human subjects. The declaration governs international research ethics and defines rules for “research combined with clinical care” and “non-therapeutic research.” The Declaration of Helsinki was revised in 1975, 1983, 1989, and 1996 and is the basis for effective clinical practices used today.

Research with humans should be based on the results from laboratory and animal experimentation
Research protocols should be reviewed by an independent committee prior to initiation
Informed consent from research participants is necessary
Research should be conducted by medically/scientifically qualified individuals
Risks should not exceed benefits

National Research Act (1974)

Because of the publicity from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the National Research Act of 1974 was passed. The National Research Act created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This commission was tasked with identifying the basic ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects. It was also tasked with developing guidelines that should be followed to assure that such research is conducted in accordance with these ethical principles. The commission drafted the Belmont Report, a foundational document in for the ethics of human subjects research in the United States.

Current Regulations

In 1981, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued regulations based on the Belmont Report. The DHHS issued the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 45 (public welfare), Part 46 (protection of human subjects). The FDA issued CFR Title 21 (food and drugs), Parts 50 (protection of human subjects), and 56 (Institutional Review Boards). In 1991, the core DHHS regulations (45 CFR Part 46, Subpart A) were formally adopted by more than a dozen other departments and agencies that conduct or fund research involving human subjects as the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, or the “Common Rule.” In 1991, the Department of Veterans Affairs promulgated this same rule at 38 CFR Part 16. Today, the 1991 version of the “Federal Policy,” as it is known, is widely shared by federal departments and agencies. The main elements of the Common Rule include the following:

requirements for assuring compliance by research institutions;
requirements for researchers obtaining and documenting informed consent;
requirements for Institutional Review Board (IRB) membership, function, operations, review of research, and record keeping; and
additional protections for certain vulnerable research subjects (pregnant women, prisoners, and children)

In addition, certain federally sponsored and much privately sponsored research is subject to the regulations of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at 21 CFR Parts 50 and 56. FDA regulations confer protections on human subjects in research when a drug, device, biologic, food additive, color additive, electronic product, or other test article subject to FDA regulation is involved. FDA regulations and the provisions of the Common Rule are largely congruent, although some significant differences exist. Both the Common Rule and the FDA regulations provide protections for human subjects in research.

National Institutes of Health, Regulations and Ethical Guidelines
History of Human Subjects Research and IRB Oversight

The history of research ethics

Throughout the ages – and especially after the scientific revolution in the 17th century – the behaviour of researchers has been subject to some form of regulations that have reflected the normative system prevailing within the research community. In addition, researchers have also sought to show respect for general ethical rules and social norms. These are integral to research ethics.

This text is taken from Knut Ruyter (red.): Forskningsetikk: Beskyttelse av enkeltpersoner og samfunn (2003), pp. 17-25. We are grateful to Gyldendal publishers for their permission to reprint this excerpt.

Introduction

In the modern age – i.e. since the Enlightenment Era – these internal scientific norms have been accompanied by a positive view of science. Research, in the natural sciences in particular, has been regarded as an expression of liberation and progress. Many good and insightful analyses have been written on this subject (e.g. Hovedkomiteen for norsk forskning 1981; Kaiser 2000).

Clearly, this normative system is active and necessary today as well. Research is encompassed and motivated by a positive assurance that its results will be applied for the benefit of humankind, as we can often read in political documents. This introductory article will not discuss such matters. It will rather address some of the reasons why distrust in research could develop in parallel to this optimistic belief in future progress. Such distrust arose in the wake of abuse directed at individuals and a fear of destructive consequences for society and life. In these conflicts, a recognition arose of how these internal scientific norms (as well as the professional ethics of the researchers) were insufficient to protect individuals against abuse and prevent destructive consequences. On this basis, a research ethics code that to some extent was developed outside and independently of the research community itself gradually came into being – and appears to be required in order to provide individuals and societies with adequate protection against strong scientific, social and economic interests.

Weighty dissertations have been written to offer explanations as to why these conflicts arose, referring to issues such as structural changes in the way in which research is undertaken, close associations with military purposes, political ideologies, the critique of rationality etc. This type of documentation will not be given any particular emphasis here. I am more concerned with providing an overview of the landmarks in the development of modern research ethics as they have emerged through history.

The Second World War – a watershed in research ethics

Many consider the Second World War as the most important landmark. This is mainly due to the reckoning with the scientific, medical experiments conducted on prisoners of war in the concentration camps. This research provided important results, but was based on causing injury or death to the people who participated in it. Other key events during the Second World War also helped raise awareness of the consequences of participation in research. One prime example is the Manhattan project, a large-scale research project to produce atomic bombs. The research succeeded, and the destructive consequences were made abundantly obvious in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is interesting to note some of the differences between these two research areas. In the medical area there was hardly any willingness among the researchers to undertake self-criticism or reckoning. In the natural sciences, the researchers themselves alerted the world to the possibilities for mass destruction resulting from the use of nuclear weapons.

Altogether 23 doctors were brought to justice in Nuremberg in 1947 for having conducted medical research on people in the concentration camps. As a direct response to the terminal experiments that had been undertaken, the verdict defined an ethical code (see The Nuremberg Code) consisting of ten rules intended to prevent the same abuse from happening again:

No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects (Article 5).

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential (Article 1).

[...] the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if [ ...] a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject (Article 10).

It was only in the wake of the Nuremberg trials that the World Medical Association started to prepare guidelines for biomedical research on humans: The Geneva Declaration (1947) and the Helsinki Declaration (1964). However, neither trials nor guidelines could prevent the abuse of people in medical research in the post-war years (see Ruyter 2003: 315–346 for examples). As a result, the World Medical Association in 1975 recommended the establishment of independent committees of research ethics to assess all medical research involving people. In my opinion, this measure has had the greatest effect on reducing the abuse of participants in medical research, and it has also helped promote good scientific practice. This establishment represents a new landmark in the form of an organised code of research ethics, which has enlisted a number of supporters.

Natural-science research on nuclear weapons was not brought to trial, but it ushered in a broad political and general debate on how the use of nuclear weapons best could be prevented. It is important to note that in this discussion, physicists and engineers in particular have assumed a significant role in influencing the public and the politicians, for example through the so-called Pugwash movement that was founded in 1957 and along with its founder Joseph Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize Laureate in chemistry and president of Pugwash in 1976–1988, urged all Nobel Prize Laureates to sign the Pugwash declaration against nuclear weapons, and 111 of them did so. However, even the Pugwash movement appears to have realised that declarations and awards are insufficient instruments to prevent undesirable consequences of natural-science research. In 1997, Joseph Rotblat called on scientists to convene to establish an international ethics committee to monitor natural-science research "regardless of how unpleasant it will be for scientists to be monitored". No such committee has been established. There is no regulation of research in this area comparable to the one that is in effect in the field of medicine.

Pollution of the environment as a result of industrial development was the second major area of the natural sciences that gave rise to a focus on the consequences of research. Rachel Carson's Silent spring (Carson 1962) was probably the first book to articulate the widespread concerns about air pollution, by asking why the birds are disappearing. Over the years, the environmental problems have grown in scale, and they are characterised as being "anthropogenic and thus a result of human action" (Ariansen 1992:11) and often based on research. This was naturally followed by questions about how these problems could be rectified. The first major environmental conference was held in Stockholm in 1974, a precursor of the principles that have been enshrined in legislation from the 1970s onwards as well as in international conventions.

The social sciences have not seen the same dramatic abuse of research participants, nor have they been confronted with the same potential social consequences. This has not prevented powerful reactions to the publication of certain types of research projects. This has been a particular result of the use of sensitive personal information. On the basis of research projects, objections have been especially raised against the use of personally identifiable information without the persons involved (or their guardians) knowing that such information had been used for research purposes. It has also been claimed that this type of study violates privacy and that it is impossible to prevent such information from being abused in the future. One such project was the so-called Metropolitan study, which was conducted in Norway and Sweden in the 1960s (Johansen, Kaspersen and Skullerud 2001:35–37). The part of the study that attracted most attention involved schoolchildren. In 1964, the Oslo school board supplied information on boys born in 1954 to the project. The study was to follow the boys from age 11 until they had become well-established adults (at the age of approximately 30 years) with the purpose of providing better vocational guidance and social assistance to young people in the future. The information supplied by the school board included names, age, housing conditions, the guardian's profession, school grades and IQ. The project attracted harsh public criticism (including by law professor Knut S. Selmer), and demands for prior consent by parents and sufficient protection of the data were put forward. The researchers appeared reluctant to introduce amendments to a project that could plead such laudable aims, but they were willing to withdraw pupils from the study if protests were received. The consequence of this vehement public criticism was a potential weakening of trust in social research. As a result, the social researchers themselves took the initiative to establish a data protection secretariat under the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities. With the development of computers – and the question of protection of individuals – the Metropolitan study can be regarded as an essential reason behind the proposals for political measures to prevent abuse after 1967–68. This led to the Act relating to Personal Data Filing Systems in 1978 and the establishment of the Norwegian Data Protection Authority in 1980. Ten years later, the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities was established, following a proposal in Report no. 28 (1988–89) to the Storting (White Paper), On research.

(See also the introductory articles on research ethics in Medical and health sciences , Natural sciences and technology and Humanities and social sciences .)

Landmarks before the Second World War: the early days

As noted above, forms of self-regulation have always existed in professions that conduct research. Most often this has been implicit, although occasionally also defined in writing. The early days of research ethics are almost exclusively associated with the field of medicine.

In the context of the development of modern medical science and experimental methods, some interesting reflections were made regarding how one should proceed when the research process involves people or animals. Some reflections of this kind were provided by Claude Bernard (1813–1878), an influential French physiologist. Many consider him to be the founder of experimental medicine, since he established the principles for conducting experiments (Bernard 1965). In contrast to the long-standing tradition in research of using vulnerable people in experiments, Bernard proposed that the researcher should begin by using himself and continue by including family members and colleagues, before starting to use patients, for example, in experiments. This may seem like a reasonable principle in research ethics: if you do not want to expose yourself to something, you should not expose anybody else to it either. Or in other words: researchers, who are best qualified to understand any risks involved, should start by exposing themselves to the risks before proceeding with other research participants who are less well equipped to understand them. Self-experiments have been practised both before and after Bernard, and they are also specifically referred to in the Nuremberg Code, but they have never been used on a large scale. More commonly, there seems to have been little debate among researchers on moral problems associated with the use of vulnerable research participants. These were often exposed to a considerable risk, which was tolerated in consideration of the benefits to be gained from potential progress (cf. Elkeles 1996).

There were, however, reactions to the use of people in research that caused authorities other than the profession itself to attempt to set a standard. One example from Norway is the trial of Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841–1912) in Bergen. He was deprived of his licence as a doctor at the Leprosy Foundation in Bergen. Hansen, who is one of Norway's most recognised researchers, is known for his discovery of the leprosy bacillus. In his investigation of the causes of leprosy he wanted to try to demonstrate that the disease is infectious by using a cataract needle to graft material from a sufferer into the eye of a patient who suffered from another type of leprosy. For this purpose he invited a 33 year-old woman to his surgery. She was reluctantly stung in the eye with the needle, and protested at this treatment. With the assistance of a clergyman, she and some other local residents lodged a complaint in Bergen city court. In his own explanation, Hansen reproaches himself for "not having communicated my intentions to the patient in advance", but was quick to excuse himself: " [...] since I could not assume that the patient would regard the experiment from the same point of view as myself, and being convinced that I had total command over the potentially occurring affliction, I refrained from doing so" (quoted in Patrix 1997:190). The court found him guilty of having caused her "bodily harm" that he could not assume "that she would have consented to submit to, if in advance he had made her aware thereof" (quoted in Aasen 2000:102)

The verdict by Bergen city court is one of the earliest signs of requirements for consent when there is a risk of causing injury (bodily harm) without this being in the best interests of the person, with the intention of gaining new knowledge in experimental research. It appears, though, that the verdict had little effect on prevailing practices. Hansen enjoyed widespread support among his colleagues. Still, this does not change the fact that a requirement for consent is included in the verdict.

This is well worth noting, since many theoreticians share the perception that the requirement for informed consent is a post-war phenomenon (for example Faden, Beauchamp and King 1986). It should also be noted that in many types of research, the researchers themselves enforced the requirement that only volunteers could be included after having consented without having been required to do so. One example is Walter Reed's research on yellow fever in the 1920s. In other contexts, the authorities imposed a requirement for consent, for example for research on soldiers in the US Navy from 1932 onwards (President's Advisory Committee 1996:499).

Only a few years after the Hansen verdict, the German professor Albert Neisser (1841–1912) was criticised for experiments he had undertaken to develop a serum therapy for syphilis, wishing to show that it would lead to immunity. One of his experiments came under public scrutiny (see Ruyter 2003:315–346 for a description) and an indictment was filed against him. Neisser was found guilty, but only received a fine. The court's emphasis on his failure to obtain consent from the participants before starting the experiment was decisive.

An interesting point in this connection is that the authorities in Prussia issued a directive in 1900 to regulate medical research (Ruyter, Føre and Solbakk 2000:250). The directive contains two material guidelines that can be found in all subsequent research ethics. The first is known from the Hansen case, here expressed as a requirement for "unambiguous consent". The second is the personal responsibility of the head of the clinic to ensure compliance with the directive. This directive appears to be the first document in which medical research is regulated by authorities other than the researchers themselves. The document places responsibility with the management, and its purpose is to protect patients in the clinics against being used in experiments that are harmful to them and undertaken without their permission.

As can be seen from these examples, there was a great interest in diseases that were assumed to be communicable. This gave rise to a large number of experimental trials, especially with children (Grodin and Glantz 1994:7–10), in which the participants were exposed to substantial risks. Some of the experiments proved to be highly useful in the development of effective vaccines and therapies, such as the vaccine against rabies (1885) and the antitoxic treatment of diphtheria (1893–94). Criticism was raised against this type of research, but this criticism failed to bring about any change in practices. Resistance was often voiced by groups that were opposed to animal experiments as such. Those who established societies for protection of animals would also promote organisations for prevention of abuse of children (Schultz 1968). Because of their ideological basis, they were often regarded as marginal and their impact was therefore limited.

Once again, a research project in Germany caused prevailing practices to be challenged. In 1930, fourteen infants died as a result of a BCG vaccine. The case led to a widespread public debate with demands for control and follow-up. In 1931, the Ministry of the Interior issued new guidelines for therapies and scientific experiments involving people (Ruyter, Førde and Solbakk 2000:251–253). The guidelines reaffirmed the responsibility and requirement for unambiguous consent. In addition, they state that researchers shall not exploit "social emergencies" (Section 7), as a response to the idea that orphans in children's homes, among others, were regarded as "ideal" candidates for experiments "under controlled conditions" (Grodin and Glantz 1994:13). This concern points towards a principle that was later incorporated into the Helsinki Declaration, stating that healthy adults should be selected first, before more vulnerable groups are included. In Norwegian this is referred to as the "descending order of permissibility". Moreover, the guidelines stipulate that the experiments must be "relatively harmless" (Section 8) and that any potential harm must be "reasonably proportionate" to the expected benefit (Section 4).

It is striking to note that this emphasis on responsibility and the enforcement of guidelines did not lead to a more effective protection of research participants. It was only in 1975 that the World Medical Association came down in favour of requiring advance approval by an independent committee before a project can be initiated. With regard to this decision as well, we can find historical examples of the need for this approval to be pointed out.

The earliest example that I am aware of from Norway dates from 1969. (The journalist Kjell Pedersen drew my attention to this reference). In the minutes from a meeting of the Norwegian Council for Radiation Protection there is a call for "ethical/radiological committees" in the context of the need for advance approval of controversial research projects; the case in question involved "plans for a Nordic study of circulatory factors in the facial skin of Sámi people etc., with the aid of a method that includes exposing the research participants to radiation". In the investigation of radiation experiments in the USA, it was discovered that some rudimentary mechanisms for assessment of research projects, such as internal control, had existed since 1946 (President's Advisory Committee 1996:500). After various forms of internal control had been attempted in the USA, it was decided that all institutions must establish local committees of research ethics for peer review in order to provide sufficient protection to all research participants. In 1971, this was introduced as a condition for undertaking research that involved human subjects. As a result of this development, Sweden established local committees of research ethics in all university hospitals in the late 1960s. The new element in the revised Helsinki Declaration was its requirement for independent ethical review. From this requirement we can find a direct link to the way in which the regional committees of medical and health research ethics were established in Denmark and Norway after 1985. The committees were not established locally, but regionally, with broad interdisciplinary representation, including laypeople. A precursor to the regional committees was the ethics commission that had been established by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities in 1978 to assess ethical aspects of applications within this field, as well as the so-called Andenæs committee that deliberated guidelines and councils for professional ethics (1977).

This article has been translated from Norwegian by Erik Hansen, Akasie språktjenester AS.

Aasen, H. Sinding (2000). Pasientens rett til selvbestemmelse ved medisinsk behandling. Bergen: Kunnskapsforlaget

Ariansen, P. (1992). Miljøfilosofi. En innføring. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget

Bernard, C. (1865). Introduction à l’étude de la mèdecine expèrimentale. Paris: Bailliere. Translated to English in 1927, republished in 1957 with the title An introduction to the study of experimental medicine.New York: Dover

Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. New York: Houghton Lifflin. Published in 2000 with a new introduction by P. Matthiessen. London: Folio Society

Elkeles, B. (1996). Der moralische Diskurs über das medizinische Menschenexperiment im 19. Jahrhundert.Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer

Faden, R.R., T.L. Beuchamp & N.M.P. King (1986). A history and theory of informed consent. New York: Oxford University Press

Ferry, G. (1998). Dorothy Hodgkin: a life. London: Granta

Grodin, M.A. & L.H.Glantz (1994). Children as research subjects. Science, ethics and law. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hovedkomiteen for norsk forskning (1981). Forskning og etisk ansvar. Oslo: Hovedkomiteene for norsk forskning

Johansen, M.W., K.-B- Kaspersen & Å.M.B. Skullerud (2001). Personopplysningsloven. Kommentarutgave.Oslo: Universitetsforlaget

Kaiser, M. (2000). Hva er vitenskap? Oslo: Universitetsforlaget

Patrix, J.-M. (1997). Gerhard Armauer Hansen. Leprabasillens oppdager. Bergen: Eide

President’s advisory committee (1996). Final report: Ethics of human subjects’ research: a historical perspective. Human radiation research. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ruyter, Knut (red.): Forskningsetikk. Beskyttelse av enkeltpersoner og samfunn. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag 2003

Ruyter, KW, Reidun Førde & Jan Helge Solbakk (2000) Medisinsk etikk - en problembasert tilnærming. Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS, Oslo

Schultz, W.J. (1968). The humane movement in the United States, 1910-1922. New York: AMS Press

Introduction: What is Research Ethics?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. This introduction covers what research ethics is, its ethical distinctions, approaches to teaching research ethics, and other resources on this topic.

What is Research Ethics

Why Teach Research Ethics

Animal Subjects

Biosecurity

Collaboration

Conflicts of Interest

Data Management

Human Subjects

Peer Review

Publication

Research Misconduct

Social Responsibility

Stem Cell Research

Whistleblowing

Descriptions of educational settings , including in the classroom, and in research contexts.

Case Studies

Other Discussion Tools

Information about the history and authors of the Resources for Research Ethics Collection

What is Research Ethics?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. It is clear that research ethics should include:

Protections of human and animal subjects

However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research subjects. Other ethical challenges are rooted in many dimensions of research, including the:

Collection, use, and interpretation of research data
Methods for reporting and reviewing research plans or findings
Relationships among researchers with one another
Relationships between researchers and those that will be affected by their research
Means for responding to misunderstandings, disputes, or misconduct
Options for promoting ethical conduct in research

The domain of research ethics is intended to include nothing less than the fostering of research that protects the interests of the public, the subjects of research, and the researchers themselves.

Ethical Distinctions

In discussing or teaching research ethics, it is important to keep some basic distinctions in mind.

It is important not to confuse moral claims about how people ought to behave with descriptive claims about how they in fact do behave. From the fact that gift authorship or signing off on un-reviewed data may be "common practice" in some contexts, it doesn't follow that they are morally or professionally justified. Nor is morality to be confused with the moral beliefs or ethical codes that a given group or society holds (how some group thinks people should live). A belief in segregation is not morally justified simply because it is widely held by a group of people or given society. Philosophers term this distinction between prescriptive and descriptive claims the 'is-ought distinction.'
A second important distinction is that between morality and the law. The law may or may not conform to the demands of ethics (Kagan, 1998). To take a contemporary example: many believe that the law prohibiting federally funded stem cell research is objectionable on moral (as well as scientific) grounds, i.e., that such research can save lives and prevent much human misery. History is full of examples of bad laws, that is laws now regarded as morally unjustifiable, e.g., the laws of apartheid, laws prohibiting women from voting or inter-racial couples from marrying.
It is also helpful to distinguish between two different levels of discussion (or two different kinds of ethical questions): first-order or "ground-level" questions and second-order questions.
First-order moral questions concern what we should do. Such questions may be very general or quite specific. One might ask whether the tradition of 'senior' authorship should be defended and preserved or, more generally, what are the principles that should go into deciding the issue of 'senior' authorship. Such questions and the substantive proposals regarding how to answer them belong to the domain of what moral philosophers call 'normative ethics.'
Second-order moral questions concern the nature and purpose of morality itself. When someone claims that falsifying data is wrong, what exactly is the standing of this claim? What exactly does the word 'wrong' mean in the conduct of scientific research? And what are we doing when we make claims about right and wrong, scientific integrity and research misconduct? These second-order questions are quite different from the ground-level questions about how to conduct one's private or professional life raised above. They concern the nature of morality rather than its content, i.e., what acts are required, permitted or prohibited. This is the domain of what moral philosophers call 'metaethics' (Kagan, 1998).

Ethical Approaches

Each of these approaches provides moral principles and ways of thinking about the responsibilities, duties and obligations of moral life. Individually and jointly, they can provide practical guidance in ethical decision-making.

One of the most influential and familiar approaches to ethics is deontological ethics, associated with Immanuel Kant (1742-1804). Deontological ethics hold certain acts as right or wrong in themselves, e.g., promise breaking or lying. So, for example, in the context of research, fraud, plagiarism and misrepresentation are regarded as morally wrong in themselves, not simply because they (tend to) have bad consequences. The deontological approach is generally grounded in a single fundamental principle: Act as you would wish others to act towards you OR always treat persons as an end, never as a means to an end.
From such central principles are derived rules or guidelines for what is permitted, required and prohibited. Objections to principle-based or deontological ethics include the difficulty of applying highly general principles to specific cases, e.g.: Does treating persons as ends rule out physician-assisted suicide, or require it? Deontological ethics is generally contrasted to consequentialist ethics (Honderich, 1995).
According to consequentialist approaches, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends solely on its consequences. One should act in such a way as to bring about the best state of affairs, where the best state of affairs may be understood in various ways, e.g., as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or maximizing the satisfaction of preferences. A theory such as Utilitarianism (with its roots in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) is generally taken as the paradigm example of consequentialism. Objections to consequentialist ethics tend to focus on its willingness to regard individual rights and values as "negotiable." So, for example, most people would regard murder as wrong independently of the fact that killing one person might allow several others to be saved (the infamous sacrifice of an ailing patient to provide organs for several other needy patients). Similarly, widespread moral opinion holds certain values important (integrity, justice) not only because they generally lead to good outcomes, but in and of themselves.
Virtue ethics focuses on moral character rather than action and behavior considered in isolation. Central to this approach is the question what ought we (as individuals, as scientists, as physicians) to be rather than simply what we ought to do. The emphasis here is on inner states, that is, moral dispositions and habits such as courage or a developed sense of personal integrity. Virtue ethics can be a useful approach in the context of RCR and professional ethics, emphasizing the importance of moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and respect. This approach has also a great deal to offer in discussions of bioethical issues where a traditional emphasis on rights and abstract principles frequently results in polarized, stalled discussions (e.g., abortion debates contrasting the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus).
The term 'an ethics of care' grows out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose empirical work in moral psychology claimed to discover a "different voice," a mode of moral thinking distinct from principle-based moral thinking (e.g., the theories of Kant and Mill). An ethics of care stresses compassion and empathetic understanding, virtues Gilligan associated with traditional care-giving roles, especially those of women.
This approach differs from traditional moral theories in two important ways. First, it assumes that it is the connections between persons, e.g., lab teams, colleagues, parents and children, student and mentor, not merely the rights and obligations of discrete individuals that matter. The moral world, on this view, is best seen not as the interaction of discrete individuals, each with his or her own interests and rights, but as an interrelated web of obligations and commitment. We interact, much of the time, not as private individuals, but as members of families, couples, institutions, research groups, a given profession and so on. Second, these human relationships, including relationships of dependency, play a crucial role on this account in determining what our moral obligations and responsibilities are. So, for example, individuals have special responsibilities to care for their children, students, patients, and research subjects.
An ethics of care is thus particularly useful in discussing human and animal subjects research, issues of informed consent, and the treatment of vulnerable populations such as children, the infirm or the ill.
The case study approach begins from real or hypothetical cases. Its objective is to identify the intuitively plausible principles that should be taken into account in resolving the issues at hand. The case study approach then proceeds to critically evaluate those principles. In discussing whistle-blowing, for example, a good starting point is with recent cases of research misconduct, seeking to identify and evaluate principles such as a commitment to the integrity of science, protecting privacy, or avoiding false or unsubstantiated charges. In the context of RCR instruction, case studies provide one of the most interesting and effective approaches to developing sensitivity to ethical issues and to honing ethical decision-making skills.
Strictly speaking, casuistry is more properly understood as a method for doing ethics rather than as itself an ethical theory. However, casuistry is not wholly unconnected to ethical theory. The need for a basis upon which to evaluate competing principles, e.g., the importance of the well-being of an individual patient vs. a concern for just allocation of scarce medical resources, makes ethical theory relevant even with case study approaches.
Applied ethics is a branch of normative ethics. It deals with practical questions particularly in relation to the professions. Perhaps the best known area of applied ethics is bioethics, which deals with ethical questions arising in medicine and the biological sciences, e.g., questions concerning the application of new areas of technology (stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, nanotechnology, etc.), end of life issues, organ transplants, and just distribution of healthcare. Training in responsible conduct of research or "research ethics" is merely one among various forms of professional ethics that have come to prominence since the 1960s. Worth noting, however, is that concern with professional ethics is not new, as ancient codes such as the Hippocratic Oath and guild standards attest (Singer, 1986).
Adams D, Pimple KD (2005): Research Misconduct and Crime: Lessons from Criminal Science on Preventing Misconduct and Promoting Integrity. Accountability in Research 12(3):225-240.
Anderson MS, Horn AS, Risbey KR, Ronning EA, De Vries R, Martinson BC (2007): What Do Mentoring and Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research Have To Do with Scientists' Misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-Funded Scientists . Academic Medicine 82(9):853-860.
Bulger RE, Heitman E (2007): Expanding Responsible Conduct of Research Instruction across the University. Academic Medicine. 82(9):876-878.
Kalichman MW (2006): Ethics and Science: A 0.1% solution. Issues in Science and Technology 23:34-36.
Kalichman MW (2007): Responding to Challenges in Educating for the Responsible Conduct of Research, Academic Medicine. 82(9):870-875.
Kalichman MW, Plemmons DK (2007): Reported Goals for Responsible Conduct of Research Courses. Academic Medicine. 82(9):846-852.
Kalichman MW (2009): Evidence-based research ethics. The American Journal of Bioethics 9(6&7): 85-87.
Pimple KD (2002): Six Domains of Research Ethics: A Heuristic Framework for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Science and Engineering Ethics 8(2):191-205.
Steneck NH (2006): Fostering Integrity in Research: Definitions, Current Knowledge, and Future Directions. Science and Engineering Ethics 12:53-74.
Steneck NH, Bulger RE (2007): The History, Purpose, and Future of Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine. 82(9):829-834.
Vasgird DR (2007): Prevention over Cure: The Administrative Rationale for Education in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine. 82(9):835-837.
Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics.
Beauchamp RL, Childress JF (2001): Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th edition, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bentham, J (1781): An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
Gilligan C (1993): In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Glover, Jonathan (1977): Penguin Books.
Honderich T, ed. (1995): The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kagan S (1998): Normative Ethics. Westview Press.
Kant I (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Kant I (1788): Critique of Practical Reason.
Kant I (1797): The Metaphysics of Morals.
Kant I (1797): On a Supposed right to Lie from Benevolent Motives.
Kuhse H, Singer P (1999): Bioethics: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishers.
Mill JS (1861): Utilitarianism.
Rachels J (1999): The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 3rd edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Regan T (1993): Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. The history of ethics.
Singer P (1993): Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

The Resources for Research Ethics Education site was originally developed and maintained by Dr. Michael Kalichman, Director of the Research Ethics Program at the University of California San Diego. The site was transferred to the Online Ethics Center in 2021 with the permission of the author.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

What is Research Ethics?

Originally published 1999-2013 at Resources for Research Ethics Education, a web project directed by Michael Kalichman, Ph.D., and Dena Plemmons, Ph.D., from the University of California-San Diego Research Ethics Program and the San Diego Research Ethics Consortium. Republished with permission.

See Also: Teaching Research Ethics: Why Teach?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research.

It is clear that research ethics should include:

Protections of human and animal subjects

Collection, use, and interpretation of research data
Methods for reporting and reviewing research plans or findings
Relationships among researchers with one another
Relationships between researchers and those that will be affected by their research
Means for responding to misunderstandings, disputes, or misconduct
Options for promoting ethical conduct in research

For the purpose of this online resource, the domain of research ethics is intended to include nothing less than the fostering of research that protects the interests of the public, the subjects of research, and the researchers themselves.

Important Ethical Distinctions

In discussing or teaching research ethics, it is important to keep some basic distinctions in mind.

Prescriptive vs. descriptive claims

It is important not to confuse moral claims about how people ought to behave with descriptive claims about how they in fact do behave. From the fact that gift authorship or signing off on unreviewed data may be “common practice” in some contexts, it doesn’t follow that they are morally or professionally justified. Nor is morality to be confused with the moral beliefs or ethical codes that a given group or society holds (how some group thinks people should live). A belief in segregation is not morally justified simply because it is widely held by a group of people or given society. Philosophers term this distinction between prescriptive and descriptive claims the “is-ought distinction.”

Law vs. morality

A second important distinction is that between morality and the law. The law may or may not conform to the demands of ethics (Kagan, 1998). To take a contemporary example: many believe that the law prohibiting federally funded stem cell research is objectionable on moral (as well as scientific) grounds, i.e., that such research can save lives and prevent much human misery. History is full of examples of bad laws, that is laws now regarded as morally unjustifiable, e.g., the laws of apartheid, laws prohibiting women from voting or inter-racial couples from marrying.

It is also helpful to distinguish between two different levels of discussion (or two different kinds of ethical questions): first-order or “ground-level” questions and second-order questions.

First-order questions

First-order moral questions concern what we should do. Such questions may be very general or quite specific. One might ask whether the tradition of “senior” authorship should be defended and preserved or, more generally, what are the principles that should go into deciding the issue of senior authorship. Such questions and the substantive proposals regarding how to answer them belong to the domain of what moral philosophers call “normative ethics.”

Second-order questions

Second-order moral questions concern the nature and purpose of morality itself. When someone claims that falsifying data is wrong, what exactly is the standing of this claim? What exactly does the word “wrong” mean in the conduct of scientific research? And what are we doing when we make claims about right and wrong, scientific integrity and research misconduct? These second-order questions are quite different from the ground-level questions about how to conduct one’s private or professional life raised above. They concern the nature of morality rather than its content, i.e., what acts are required, permitted or prohibited. This is the domain of what moral philosophers call “metaethics” (Kagan, 1998).

Ways to Approach Ethics

Deontological ethics

One of the most influential and familiar approaches to ethics is deontological ethics, associated with Immanuel Kant (1742-1804). Deontological ethics hold certain acts as right or wrong in themselves, e.g., promise breaking or lying. So, for example, in the context of research, fraud, plagiarism and misrepresentation are regarded as morally wrong in themselves, not simply because they (tend to) have bad consequences. The deontological approach is generally grounded in a single fundamental principle: Act as you would wish others to act towards you OR always treat persons as an end, never as a means to an end.

From such central principles are derived rules or guidelines for what is permitted, required and prohibited. Objections to principle-based or deontological ethics include the difficulty of applying highly general principles to specific cases, e.g.: Does treating persons as ends rule out physician-assisted suicide, or require it? Deontological ethics is generally contrasted to consequentialist ethics (Honderich, 1995).

Consequentialist ethics

According to consequentialist approaches, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends solely on its consequences. One should act in such a way as to bring about the best state of affairs, where the best state of affairs may be understood in various ways, e.g., as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or maximizing the satisfaction of preferences. A theory such as Utilitarianism (with its roots in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) is generally taken as the paradigm example of consequentialism. Objections to consequentialist ethics tend to focus on its willingness to regard individual rights and values as “negotiable.” So, for example, most people would regard murder as wrong independently of the fact that killing one person might allow several others to be saved (the infamous sacrifice of an ailing patient to provide organs for several other needy patients). Similarly, widespread moral opinion holds certain values important (integrity, justice) not only because they generally lead to good outcomes, but in and of themselves.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics focuses on moral character rather than action and behavior considered in isolation. Central to this approach is the question what ought we (as individuals, as scientists, as physicians) to be rather than simply what we ought to do. The emphasis here is on inner states, that is, moral dispositions and habits such as courage or a developed sense of personal integrity. Virtue ethics can be a useful approach in the context of RCR and professional ethics, emphasizing the importance of moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and respect. This approach has also a great deal to offer in discussions of bioethical issues where a traditional emphasis on rights and abstract principles frequently results in polarized, stalled discussions (e.g., abortion debates contrasting the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus).

An ethics of care

The term “ethics of care” grows out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose empirical work in moral psychology claimed to discover a “different voice,” a mode of moral thinking distinct from principle-based moral thinking (e.g., the theories of Kant and Mill). An ethics of care stresses compassion and empathetic understanding, virtues Gilligan associated with traditional care-giving roles, especially those of women.

This approach differs from traditional moral theories in two important ways. First, it assumes that it is the connections between persons, e.g., lab teams, colleagues, parents and children, student and mentor, not merely the rights and obligations of discrete individuals that matter. The moral world, on this view, is best seen not as the interaction of discrete individuals, each with his or her own interests and rights, but as an interrelated web of obligations and commitment. We interact, much of the time, not as private individuals, but as members of families, couples, institutions, research groups, a given profession and so on. Second, these human relationships, including relationships of dependency, play a crucial role on this account in determining what our moral obligations and responsibilities are. So, for example, individuals have special responsibilities to care for their children, students, patients, and research subjects.

An ethics of care is thus particularly useful in discussing human and animal subjects research, issues of informed consent, and the treatment of vulnerable populations such as children, the infirm or the ill.

Casuistry or case study approaches

The case study approach begins from real or hypothetical cases. Its objective is to identify the intuitively plausible principles that should be taken into account in resolving the issues at hand. The case study approach then proceeds to critically evaluate those principles. In discussing whistle-blowing, for example, a good starting point is with recent cases of research misconduct, seeking to identify and evaluate principles such as a commitment to the integrity of science, protecting privacy, or avoiding false or unsubstantiated charges. In the context of RCR instruction, case studies provide one of the most interesting and effective approaches to developing sensitivity to ethical issues and to honing ethical decision-making skills.

Strictly speaking, casuistry is more properly understood as a method for doing ethics rather than as itself an ethical theory. However, casuistry is not wholly unconnected to ethical theory. The need for a basis upon which to evaluate competing principles, e.g., the importance of the well-being of an individual patient vs. a concern for just allocation of scarce medical resources, makes ethical theory relevant even with case study approaches.

Applied ethics

Applied ethics is a branch of normative ethics. It deals with practical questions particularly in relation to the professions. Perhaps the best known area of applied ethics is bioethics, which deals with ethical questions arising in medicine and the biological sciences, e.g., questions concerning the application of new areas of technology (stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, nanotechnology, etc.), end of life issues, organ transplants, and just distribution of healthcare. Training in responsible conduct of research or “research ethics” is merely one among various forms of professional ethics that have come to prominence since the 1960s. Worth noting, however, is that concern with professional ethics is not new, as ancient codes such as the Hippocratic Oath and guild standards attest (Singer, 1986).

Research Ethics

Adams, D., Pimple, K.D. (2005). Research Misconduct and Crime: Lessons from Criminal Science on Preventing Misconduct and Promoting Integrity. Accountability in Research, 12 (3): 225-240.
Anderson, M.S., Horn, A.S., Risbey, K.R., Ronning, E.A., De Vries, R., Martinson, B.C. (2007). What Do Mentoring and Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research Have To Do with Scientists’ Misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-Funded Scientists. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 853-860.
Bulger, R.E. & Heitman, E. (2007). Expanding Responsible Conduct of Research Instruction across the University. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 876-878.
Kalichman, M.W. (2006). Ethics and Science: A 0.1% solution. Issues in Science and Technology, 23 : 34-36.
Kalichman, M.W. (2007). Responding to Challenges in Educating for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 870-875.
Kalichman, M.W., Plemmons, D.K. (2007). Reported Goals for Responsible Conduct of Research Courses. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 846-852.
Kalichman, M.W. (2009). Evidence-based research ethics. The American Journal of Bioethics, 9 (6&7): 85-87.
Pimple, K.D. (2002). Six Domains of Research Ethics: A Heuristic Framework for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Science and Engineering Ethics, 8 (2): 191-205.
Steneck, N.H. (2006). Fostering Integrity in Research: Definitions, Current Knowledge, and Future Directions. Science and Engineering Ethics, 12 : 53-74.
Steneck, N.H., Bulger, R.E. (2007). The History, Purpose, and Future of Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 829-834.
Vasgird, D.R. (2007). Prevention over Cure: The Administrative Rationale for Education in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 835-837.
Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics .
Beauchamp, R.L. & Childress, J.F. (2001). Principles of Biomedical Ethics , 5th edition. NY: Oxford University Press.
Bentham, J. (1781). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
Gilligan, C. (1993). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Glover, Jonathan. (1977). Causing Death and Saving Lives. Penguin Books.
Honderich, T, ed. (1995). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kagan, S. (1998). Normative Ethics . Westview Press.
Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals .
Kant, I. (1788). Critique of Practical Reason .
Kant, I. (1797). The Metaphysics of Morals .
Kant, I. (1797). On a Supposed right to Lie from Benevolent Motives .
Kuhse, H. & Singer, P. (1999). Bioethics: An Anthology . Blackwell Publishers.
Mill, J.S. (1861). Utilitarianism.
Rachels, J. (1999). The Elements of Moral Philosophy , 3rd edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Regan, T. (1993). Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy , 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. The history of ethics
Singer, P (1993). Practical Ethics , 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press

The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics

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Published: 18 July 2017
Volume 24 , pages 1379–1392, ( 2018 )

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How can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond the standard narrative of codification—a story that does not reach back beyond World War II—without becoming so broad as to lose all distinctiveness? This article proposes a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competencies, qualities, or dispositions. Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology, the article argues that the “revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. They tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. These ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. The project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are their scientific selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

Ethical Issues in Research: Perceptions of Researchers, Research Ethics Board Members and Research Ethics Experts

what is the point? teaching graduate students how to construct political science research puzzles

What is research funding, how does it influence research, and how is it recorded key dimensions of variation.

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Introduction

The history of research ethics has often been reduced to the history of its codification. It has been reduced, more specifically, to codification in scientific codes of conduct such as the Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Textbooks on research ethics testify to the enduring power of this view when they trace the history of their field back to codification issued in response to medical experiments in Nazi Germany (e.g. Flynn and Goldsmith 2013 : 9; Boddington 2012 : 16; Fisher and Anushku 2008 : 95; Wassenaar 2006 : 61; Reiser 2002 : 3; Bulger 2002 : 117; Barnbaum and Byron 2001 : 3). As long as research ethics is regarded as a realm of reflection different from scientific work itself—that is, different from data collection, hypothesis testing, statistical modelling, and the like—such an historical account is not implausible. Specifically, as long as historical inquiry is charged only with the task of providing historical antecedents to what is currently understood as research ethics—a key assumption of what the historian Herbert Butterfield ( 1931 ) called “Whig history”—there is little reason to question this textbook narrative.

The picture becomes considerably more complicated, however, as soon as we replace the closed-ended question “When has research ethics as we currently know it come into being?” with the open-ended question “How did scientists prior to the 1940s reflect on the ethical dimensions of their research?” Four recent trends in the history of medical ethics, as conveniently summarized by Robert Baker and Laurence McCullough ( 2009 ), illustrate just how much complexity this change of question adds to the history of research ethics. First, historians of medical ethics are expanding their subject matter to a variety of ethical discourses. Instead of focusing merely on language of rights and duties such as used in much of contemporary ethical reflection, they are increasingly also paying attention to older ethical discourses, including languages of honor, virtue, and “decorum” (Jonsen 2000 ; Baker 1999 : 36–41; Haber 1991 : 274–293). This is partly because, in the second place, historians of medical ethics are widening their range of source material. In a time when codes of conduct were still rare, ethical reflection on scientific conduct took place primarily in other genres, such as textbooks and professorial addresses on the scientific vocation (Baker 2013 ; Jonsen 2000 : vi, xi). From this it follows, thirdly, that research ethics is much older than the term itself. Arguably, physicians in Renaissance Europe were already engaged in medical ethics when they reflected on the marks of a responsible doctor (Jonsen 2000 : 43–56; Schleiner 1995 ). Finally, if research ethics amounts to reflection on the normative aspects of scientific conduct, there is no reason to maintain a traditional focus on “big issues” such as human experimentation (Schmidt and Frewer 2007 ). As Martin Pernick ( 2009 : 16) argues, “value issues at stake in the nondramatic daily events” of scientific practice or health care are just as important a subject matter for historians of research ethics as the question “Should the doctor pull the plug?”

Perhaps the most important implication of this rewriting of the history of medical ethics is that research ethics is no longer regarded as distinct from science or medicine as such, but seen as permeating every aspect of the medical-scientific enterprise. The new approach thus challenges conventional distinctions between “scientific morality” (what scientists believe to be ethically responsible conduct) and “research ethics” (rules of conduct laid down in official ethical codes) (Baker 2013 : 9–10) by recognizing ethical commitments in all normative assumptions as to how to engage responsibly in scientific research. This revisionism, however, also has a potential danger. If research ethics is becoming all-pervading, simply because all scientific activity is value-laden (Laudan 1986 ), then research ethics runs a risk of becoming indistinguishable from science itself. At some point, the word “ethics” ceases to have a distinct referent in historical reality.

So how can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond codification (the standard narrative) without losing all distinctiveness (the risk implied in the revisionist approach)? This article offers a way out of the dilemma by proposing a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competences, qualities, or dispositions (Paul 2016b ; Dumont 2008 : 32–53; Daston and Galison 2007 : 35–39, 198–205). This proposal has three advantages. First, by focusing on the scientific self and its defining qualities, it joins recent historians of medical ethics in challenging artificial distinctions between the history of science and the history of research ethics. Secondly, it expands the horizon beyond medicine so as to include other fields, from chemistry and philology to psychology and geography. Finally, and arguably most importantly, it allows for long-term histories, sensitive to variety in ethical idioms, while keeping a focus on the qualities believed to be conducive to responsible scientific conduct. The proposal thus allows for a wide scope, but also offers a focus.

Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology—Leopold Ranke’s Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber (Critique of Modern Historians, 1824 ), Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species ( 1859 ), and Émile Durkheim’s Les règles de la méthode sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895)—this article argues that the “scientific revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. All three authors tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. This article subsequently shows that these ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. By way of conclusion, it is argued that the project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are our selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

Three Classics

Darwin’s Origin of Species , to start with, is usually read as “one long argument” about natural selection as a primary mechanism for biological evolution. Yet at the same time, Darwin’s book is a treatise about the study of nature and, more specifically, the character traits that its author regarded as indispensable for a scientific naturalist. Judging by the opening paragraph, in which Darwin described the years of study that had gone into the book, patience and perseverance were prominent among these character traits: “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision” (Darwin 1859 : 1). If haste was detrimental to biological study as Darwin conceived of it, so were incautiousness, partiality, and “preconceived opinion.” Throughout the book, Darwin emphasized the importance of cautiousness, “dispassionate judgment,” and “flexibility of mind”—character traits that may be labelled “epistemic virtues” in so far as Darwin believed them to be indispensable for the epistemic project of understanding the nature of nature (Darwin 1859 : 2, 6, 460, 482). More specifically, with clever rhetorical ploys, Darwin stylized himself as an author actually embodying these virtues (Levine 2011 ). The first person singular that emerges from Darwin’s pages is an “I” intent on overcoming “the blindness of preconceived opinion”—not by force or genius, but by cautious, patient, and open-minded inquiry (Darwin 1859 : 483).

In the context of nineteenth-century England, this appeal to virtues conventionally associated with Isaac Newton, the undisputed hero of Victorian science (Higgitt 2007 ; Fara 2002 ; Yeo 1988 ), served two purposes at once. On the one hand, it was a defensive strategy, aimed at convincing skeptical readers that Darwin’s evolutionary theory strictly adhered to Newtonian principles of investigation (Bellon 2014 : 223–224; Ruse 1999 : 176). Unsurprisingly, this strategy worked only to an extent: it did not prevent critics from observing that Darwin had a proclivity for going where angels feared to tread. Although no one could object to open-mindedness as such—in Victorian England, “unflinching courage to declare the truths… how far soever removed from ordinary apprehension” even counted as a Newtonian virtue (Brougham 1858 : 90)—the entomologist Thomas Vernon Wollaston was one among many who read the Origin of Species as a book full of “bold hypotheses and philosophical suggestions” (Wollaston 1860 : 139), while the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart, in response to The Descent of Man (1871), emphasized Darwin’s “extraordinarily active imagination” in developing bold hypotheses (Mivart 1871 : 47; cf. Hull 1973 : 135, 354).

More important, therefore, was Darwin’s second aim in emphasizing open-mindedness and independence of judgment as remedies to the “blindness of preconceived opinion.” These virtues not only befitted a man skeptical about received religious doctrine (Moore 1988 ), but also were of special importance to a scientist who preferred to work in the seclusion of his private estate, far away from universities and in cherished independence from colleagues or employers (White 2016 ). The virtue of open-mindedness in particular was central to a conception of scientific selfhood that privileged critical reasoning over dependence from peers, deference to senior colleagues, and respect for public sensitivities. No one grasped this better than Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog,” whose extensive praise for Darwin was part of a campaign to establish a “new code of scientific conduct,” focused on rigorous inquiry more than on gentlemanly behavior (White 2003 : 45). What interested Huxley most was not natural selection per se , but Darwin as “the incorporated ideal of a man of science,” characterized by virtues such as independence, courage, and an “almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were irradiated” (Huxley 1882 : 597). For Huxley, then, Darwin symbolized the emergence of a new scientific persona: the “professional scientist” for whom solving scientific questions was more important than fulfilling civic responsibilities—even if Darwin’s financial independence was out of reach for most emerging “scientists” (Mody 2016 ).

Similar concerns about the scientific self permeated Ranke’s “critique of modern historians,” which appeared at a time when Darwin was still at school and Ranke still a gymnasium teacher. The book is as rhetorically ingenious as Darwin’s and has arguably been as influential among historians as the Origin of Species has been among biologists. At first sight, it offers nothing more than a case-by-case examination of what Ranke calls the “trustworthiness” of early modern historians such as Francesco Guicciardini. Yet the results at which Ranke arrived had important implications for the historian’s self. When Ranke found the Florentine humanist guilty of “modification of facts” and “forgery of truth,” mostly caused by uncritical reliance on other authors, this implied that Guicciardini failed to live up to Ranke’s “modern” idea of what a historian should be (Ranke 1824 : 24, 26). Even the most illustrious of early modern historians appeared no longer suitable as a model that modern historians could follow.

Like Darwin, therefore, Ranke proposed an alternative conception of selfhood, which he largely described in terms of virtues. “Trustworthiness,” for Ranke, required unflagging commitment to “naked truth without any adornment, thorough research of particulars… [and] no fabrication, not even in details” (Ranke 1824 : 28). In highlighting these virtues, Ranke distanced himself not only from Renaissance historians, but also from older contemporaries such as G. W. F. Hegel, whose grand-scale philosophical history had little patience for “research of particulars,” and Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, whose moralizing habits obscured the “naked truth” as Ranke envisioned it. Initially, this revolutionary agenda was not particularly appreciated: colleagues such as Heinrich Leo ridiculed Ranke for his obsession with factual accuracy, while others saw Ranke as lacking “philosophical and religious seriousness” (Juhnke 2015 : 54–55, 60; Baur 1998 : 112–123). This criticism had little effect, though, as accuracy and precision were important qualities for a new type of historian that the mid-nineteenth century saw emerge: a source collector who spent long days in archival depositories, exploring the documentary record of the national past (Paul 2013 ). Thanks to a proliferating demand for source editions, in Germany as well as elsewhere, many of Ranke’s students found employment in projects that demanded philological virtues rather than philosophical vision or moral conviction (Weber 1984 ). Consequently, these students had little trouble turning Ranke into a model of “scientific history,” in comparison to which Leo’s Hegelian approach appeared as “pre-scientific.” In particular, Ranke was stylized into an epitome of “criticism,” “precision,” and “penetration,” as one pupil phrased it (Waitz 1867 : 4), or into an embodiment of “objectivity,” as later generations would put it (Iggers 1962 ; Krill 1962 ; Paul 2017 ).

Objectivity was a key virtue for Durkheim, too, even though the rationalist leanings of the French sociologist lent this virtue a color different from Ranke’s. Les règles de la méthode sociologique is a passionate defense of research untainted by prejudice and fixed opinion. Cautioning against “the promptings of common sense,” “naivety,” “speculation,” and “dogmatism” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 31, 32, 37, 38), the book articulates a view of science that revolves around “mechanical objectivity” (Daston and Galison 2007 : 121). For Durkheim, this implied, among other things, that a scientific sociologist has to “escape from the dominance of commonly held notions and to direct his attention to the facts” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 74).

This was more than a nineteenth-century update of Francis Bacon’s classic warning against “idols of the mind.” By contrasting “ideas” and “facts,” Durkheim engaged in no less than three polemics at once. At a most general level, he criticized a Cartesian-inspired type of philosophizing that he perceived as prioritizing generalization over patient collection of data. More specifically, he distanced himself from sociology as practiced by Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, both of whom he judged guilty of uncritically relying on philosophical generalizations for which no sociological evidence existed (Comte’s law of the three stages serves as an example: Durkheim 1982 /1895: 64, 140). Closer to home, finally, Durkheim’s “explosive document” (Gane 1988 : 19) was targeted against sociologists like Gabriel Tarde, who worked with a concept of individual agency that Durkheim reckoned among the unexamined ideas that scientists should abandon in favor of facts (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 59). Durkheimian sociology, in short, was a rebellion against several inherited traditions of reflection on the social, characterized by firm rejection of all “vague impressions, prejudices, and passions” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 66).

At the same time, Durkheim was advocating a catalog of virtues that matched the kind of research that he organized around the Année sociologique —a journal that sought to enhance scientific standards through cooperation and mutual criticism between its contributors (Heilbron 2015 : 82–91; Besnard 1983 ; Clark 1973 : 181–186). Whereas Ranke’s philological virtues were most at home in a scientific culture that put a premium value on the collecting and editing of historical source material, Durkheim’s mechanical objectivity best fitted the collective research environment that the French sociologist created around the Année sociologique . This shows that the scientific self cannot be seen apart from its institutional contexts, on the one hand, and from the kind of research pursued in those contexts, on the other. The scientific self is being shaped by its environment, just as research questions and methods make their demands on it.

Disciplining the Scientific Self

So here we have three scientific manifestos, from three different disciplines in three European countries, all of which called for a “revolution” in their respective fields of inquiry. Although, especially in Darwin’s case, these revolutions primarily challenged inherited scientific theories, the new interpretative models corresponded to a new conception of scientific selfhood. That is why all three authors located part of their revolutions within the self. At least to some extent, they sought to change science by changing the scientist—that is, by molding his (not yet her) dispositions or character traits. But how could this be done? How could virtues be acquired and vices be unlearned, especially if this challenged established views on the nature of a good scientist?

Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim all dwelt at length on the efforts this required, meanwhile offering psychological explanations as to why their intended revolutions were long overdue and unlikely to win many hearts. Durkheim most explicitly pointed to the power of unconsciously acquired mental habits when he argued that no scientist is likely to overcome all prejudice: “The mind has such a natural disposition to fail to recognise” the power of preconceptions “that inevitably we will relapse into past errors” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72). Darwin, too, elaborated on “the chief cause of our natural unwillingness” to accept such radical ideas as that evolution proceeds through natural selection: “[W]e are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps” (Darwin 1859 : 481). Ranke, finally, added that historians have reasons for altering historical truth: they care about the dramatic qualities of their narratives and seek to please their readers (Ranke 1824 : 72, 76).

To justify their fights against these psychological obstacles, all three authors positioned themselves in long-term narratives of slow but steady scientific progress. Their rhetoric abounds with phrases like “as yet unexplained,” “much remains obscure,” and “still less do we know” (Darwin 1859 : 6). Ignorance, indeed, is a key term in the Origin of Species (“nor do we know how ignorant we are”) (Darwin 1859 : 466; see also Wallace 1995 ). Similar phrases—“we are virtually ignorant,” “we are only just beginning to perceive a few glimmers of light”—appear throughout Durkheim’s Règles (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 38). Apparently, the scientific revolutions required scientists to subject their “prescientific selves” (Kaufman-Osborn 1987 : 642) to strict scientific demands.

This led Durkheim to emphasize the importance of “rigorous discipline,” with all the Foucauldian connotations of that term: “Only sustained and special practice can prevent such shortcomings” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72, 31). While Ranke provided such training in his historische Übungen —an informal seminar for advanced students that soon acquired the symbolic significance of a rite of initiation into the historians’ guild (Eskildsen 2007 ; Huttner 2001 ; Pandel 1994 )—Durkheim’s educational facility was the Année sociologique , a journal (as we saw above) that socialized emerging sociologists into an ethos of objectivity by making them cooperate with each other, under Durkheim’s supervision. Darwin’s followers, too, agreed on the importance of “mental discipline,” although Huxley added that “enthusiasm for truth” is usually best kindled by exemplary figures who show in concrete detail what a scientific self looks like (Huxley 1874 : 665). Unsurprisingly, Huxley used the occasion of the unveiling of a Darwin statue in the British Museum of Natural History to argue that Darwin, more than anybody else, embodied “the ideal according to which [future students of nature] must shape their lives” (Huxley 1885 : 535).

Moral Economies of Science

To what extent does such disciplining of scientific selves qualify as belonging to the realm of research ethics? From the perspective of the standard narrative summarized above, quarrels between competing scientific schools on the marks of a good scientist seem to be of only marginal relevance. However, if we follow recent historians of medical ethics in broadening research ethics so as to include the “moral economies of science,” defined as webs of emotionally charged values that cultivate “mental habits, methods of investigation, and even characters of a distinctive stamp” (Daston 1995 : 23), then there are four reasons as to why the molding of scientific selves is an integral part of research ethics.

Although cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity are often classified as epistemic virtues, they were also heavily charged with moral meaning—to such an extent that the “epistemic” and the “moral” are often difficult to disentangle (Creyghton et al. 2016 ). For Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity were virtues demarcating the difference between appropriate and inappropriate scientific conduct. Virtues were thus no supererogatory qualities, but preconditions for proper scientific work. The fact that not all scientists possessed those qualities to the same extent is no argument against them: virtue language specified the “ought,” not the “is” (Saarloos 2016 ; Paul 2012 ). Consequently, when nineteenth-century scientists debated the character traits characteristic of a “man of science,” they were discussing research ethical standards. In their eyes, skepticism towards established authority, detachment from political engagement, and indifference to monetary profit were markers of devotion to responsible scientific research.

The critical responses that Ranke’s, Darwin’s, and Durkheim’s manifestos elicited (Henz 2014 : 127–133; Hull 1973 ; Gane 1988 : 75–86) illustrate, among other things, that standards of virtue were not seldom contested. Even if few critics doubted the need for impartiality or criticism as such, scientists frequently found themselves disagreeing over the relative importance of these virtues (Paul 2015 ). Consequently, moral economies were not universally shared: they existed in the plural (Daston 1995 : 3), as did the models that scientists invoked as embodiments of their ethics (Paul 2017 ). Such diversity of opinion about the marks of a scientific self does not distract, however, from their ethical significance. To the contrary, judging by the strong moral language sometimes used to criticize adherents of alternative models—“renegades who do not belong in the sanctuary of… science” (Lehmann 1895 : 79)—it seems that the scientific self was subject to debate precisely because of its key position in a virtue-oriented type of research ethics.

The severity of the ethical issues at stake is apparent from the consequences that those involved were sometimes prepared to draw. When Huxley charged Richard Owen with not living up to Darwinian standards, he not only criticized his senior colleague in print, but also tried to block his election to the Royal Society Council on the ground that this would be a moral mistake (White 2003 : 54). Likewise, Max Lehmann, one of Ranke’s students, not only drew public attention to what he perceived as the “unscientific” working manners of his intended Marburg successor, Albert Naudé, but also worked behind the scenes to prevent his appointment (Lehmann 1894 : 129; Paul 2016a ). Consequently, there was no lack of ethical boundary work, defined as deliberate attempts to exclude colleagues suspected of “unethical” conduct from the realm of science (Wainwright et al. 2006 ; Hesketh 2008 ).

For students, finally, ideals of virtue had tangible implications to the extent that they translated into pedagogical regimes. Part of academic socialization in nineteenth-century fashion consisted of ethical formation focused on the cultivation of character traits believed to be conducive to the practice of responsible science. Such cultivation of virtues not only took place in seminars and laboratories (Eskildsen 2007 ; Jardine 1992 ; Olesko 1991 ), but also ranked high among the aims of academic mentoring (Manteufel 2016 ) and, perhaps less obvious, team sports of the sort fervently played by students at Oxbridge colleges (Warwick 2003 : 176–226). Although these practices obviously served more than research ethical goals, they were believed to contribute to ethical formation by fostering relevant character traits, not least including self-discipline and devotion to a common cause (Levine 2002 ; Anderson 2001 ). Research ethics was not usually the subject of special courses, but a matter of character formation to which informal academic socialization contributed at least as much as formal educational practices (Eskildsen 2015 , 2016 ).

Beyond the Nineteenth Century

If the analysis so far lends plausibility to the view that nineteenth-century scientists conceived of research ethics in terms of virtues or character traits, further argument is needed to sustain the claim that the scientific self is a suitable focus for a long-term history of research ethics. Specifically, two closely related issues need to be addressed: (1) Assuming that virtue language largely fell into disuse in the twentieth century, how do the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim relate to the moral language prevalent in twentieth-century codes of conduct? Specifically, is there sufficient continuity to allow for long-term comparison? (2) Virtue is a relevant category as long as individuals can put their stamp on scientific research. But to what extent was that the case in the Cold War military-industrial-scientific complex, or is that the case in today’s globally entangled world of science? Does the scientific self still matter in an age of “science 3.0” (Miedema 2012 )?

As for the first question, the assumption that virtue language has disappeared in the course of the twentieth century is in need of empirical testing. Whereas the generic term “virtue” has come to be imbued with Victorian connotations, this is not typically the case for dispositions conventionally classified as virtues, such as accuracy, precision, and objectivity. Whether scientists in, say, 1970 spoke less often about accuracy, precision, or objectivity than their predecessors in 1870 is a question still awaiting detailed historical inquiry. Additionally, it would be erroneous to think that codes of conduct had no space for virtue language. Codes of conduct were, and are, a heterogeneous genre, especially in that they often drew eclectically on several moral languages at once. Although it seems that early codes, such as those issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 1927 ) and the American Chemical Society ( 1947 ), used categories of virtue and honor more prominently than late twentieth-century ones, as late as 1980, the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics combined “deontology, decorum, and politic ethics,” as Albert Jonsen ( 2000 : 117) has shown. Even the American Psychological Association, whose 1981 code clearly favored a language of “skills” and “competences,” could not resist invoking classic epistemic virtues, such as objectivity, carefulness, and accuracy ( 1981 : 633, 634). Arguably, therefore, the story of virtue language in twentieth-century research ethics is more complicated than assumed in simple narratives of decline.

Secondly, even if detailed follow-up research would demonstrate an overall decline in virtue language, this would not imply that scientific selfhood became obsolete in an age of “science 3.0.” As Steven Shapin forcefully argues, the increase in scale and complexity characteristic of twentieth-century scientific research in and outside of academia did not produce an “elimination of the personal” of a sort proclaimed by conservative and progressive social theorists alike. To the contrary, it made increasing demands on individuals’ personal abilities to navigate complex professional environments. Although twentieth-century research managers might have smiled at the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, or Durkheim, their job advertisements reveal how much they continued to care about “imagination, initiative, resourcefulness, energy, persistence, judgment, honesty, accuracy, dependability, loyalty and cooperativeness”—all of which are personal dispositions (Shapin 2008 : 184). Likewise, whenever scientists in more recent decades tried to persuade venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars into research projects aimed at curing cancer, they made strategic use of time-honored repertoires of respectability and trustworthiness (Shapin 2008 : 270). All this leads Shapin to conclude that the scientific self has anything but become obsolete, even if categories of virtue have frequently been replaced by skills and competences. “The closer you get to the heart of technoscience… the greater is the acknowledged role of the personal, the familiar, and even the charismatic” (Shapin 2008 : 5).

A history of research ethics focused on the scientific self is therefore not a history of virtues alone, but a history of multiple discourses and practices on which scientists in various times and places drew in articulating, advocating, and implementing their research ethical standards. These discourses, in turn, were not confined to particular genres: they were used in different contexts, varying from informal historische Übungen to formalized codes of conduct. Yet what all these genres, discourses, and practices had in common is that they defined the scientific self and specified the expectations that scientists had to meet in order to be recognized as professionals. This, then, offers a suitable prism for a history of research ethics able to cover various periods, regions, scientific disciplines, and linguistic conventions. The history of research ethics proposed in this article is a history of demands placed upon the scientific self, in multiple languages, in several scientific genres, and in various research and educational practices.

This implies, by way of conclusion, that a history of research ethics focusing on the scientific self expands the standard narrative, according to which research ethics emerged in response to World War II atrocities, into a longer and more intricate story about the demands that changing moral economies place upon scientists. Also, it broadens the subject matter of the history of research ethics by expanding its subject matter beyond ethical protocols. By putting the scientific self at center stage, it locates ethical reflection and formation right in the heart of scientific activity. Strategically, this encourages cooperation between historians of science and historians of research ethics. It invites the former to take seriously the ethical aspects of the scientific revolutions associated with the names of Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, just as it invites the latter to recognize that virtues such as advocated by these scientists were markers of a research ethics avant la lettre .

Finally, by way of coda, a study of moral demands made on scientists in times and places other than ours is not an antiquarian project. Examining how scientific selves were shaped and disciplined in earlier periods of history implicitly raises the question how scientific selfhood is molded in our days. What kind of ethical standards are implied in today’s academic reward structures? What sort of scientific conduct do competitive research funding schemes encourage (Mountz et al. 2015 ; Anderson et al. 2007 )? How do social media and research evaluation protocols contribute to what is called a “quantified academic self” (Hammarfelt, De Rijcke, and Rushforth 2016 )? Or what are the ethical subtexts of books like Donald Hall’s The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual ( 2002 )? Historical research of the kind proposed in this article holds up a mirror to present-day scientists, thereby encouraging them to examine the ethical implications inherent to current models of scientific selfhood.

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Acknowledgments

This article presents some of the main findings of a research project on “The Scholarly Self: Character, Habit, and Virtue in the Humanities, 1860–1930,” carried out at Leiden University and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grant No. 276-69-003). The author would like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous readers for their useful feedback.

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Paul, H. The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 24 , 1379–1392 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9945-8

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Scher S, Kozlowska K. Rethinking Health Care Ethics [Internet]. Singapore: Palgrave Pivot; 2018. doi: 10.1007/978-981-13-0830-7_3

Rethinking Health Care Ethics [Internet].

Chapter 3 the rise of bioethics: a historical overview.

Published online: August 3, 2018.

The bioethics movement did not arise and expand in a vacuum. As discussed in this chapter, advances within medicine were creating a need for ethical issues to be identified and addressed. Major new work in philosophy suggested that philosophically trained “bioethicists” could uniquely contribute to ethics in medicine. The growing momentum of the consumer rights movement lent its particular, rights-oriented contours to bioethics and the demands it placed on physicians. Likewise, courts were giving legal force to the rights of patients against doctors. These diverse forces coalesced into a worldwide movement—despite the mixed response in Europe and elsewhere—that came to dominate the scholarly literature in health care ethics (not just in medicine) and that set itself as a model for how health professionals were supposed to think about clinical ethics.

Modest Beginnings

The modern era of health care ethics is often traced to Henry Beecher’s influential, 1966 article on ethical problems in clinical research, with particular attention (through a series of actual examples) to the failure to inform patients of the risks involved in experimental treatments (Beecher 1966 ). Beecher, a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, soon followed that article with another, also published in the New England Journal of Medicine , on the ethical problems in caring for “hopelessly unconscious patients” (Beecher 1968 ). In this second article Beecher gave particular attention to the problem of determining when medical treatment could be discontinued. He well recognized that the issues addressed in both of these articles were the product of the explosive, postwar growth of medical research and the resulting, unprecedented advances in understanding and treating disease. That is, these unprecedented advances carried with them equally unprecedented ethical problems in the care of patients.

Beecher’s approach to addressing these ethical problems was simple. He had published these articles in the United States’ leading medical journal, whose primary audience was his fellow physicians and clinical researchers; he had identified the problems concretely and with precision; and he expected the medical profession—and even individual researchers and health care providers—to take appropriate action. For example, in the case of the problems that he had identified in clinical research, he reasoned that the most “reliable safeguard” of the patient’s interests—and against unethical behavior—was “the presence of an intelligent, informed, conscientious, compassionate, responsible investigator” (Beecher 1966 , p. 1360). 1

The Hastings Center and Kennedy Institute of Ethics

The world of health care ethics did not remain that simple for long. New problems were emerging faster than the medical profession, without an immediate, large-scale, and immediate effort, could itself address. The result was a developing, and growing, gap between the profession’s established practices, ethical and otherwise, and the public’s need to address the problems that emerged as modern medicine extended its scientific and clinical powers. The gap was soon filled by the founding in 1969 of the Hastings Center/Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, a signal event in the development of modern health care ethics. The new field that took shape was called bioethics —a term explicitly chosen to encompass not only medicine and the rest of health care, but the entire field of the (human) life sciences (Callahan 1971 , 1973 ). The Hastings Center—located in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York City—took the lead in setting the direction, methods, and intellectual standards of bioethics through its own journal, the Hastings Center Report (Callahan 1971 , 1973 ). The Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, another bastion of bioethics, was founded two years later, in 1971. 2

In order to understand the direction, both short and long term, taken by the Hastings Center and Kennedy Institute of Ethics, by their growing number of advocates (especially from outside the medical profession), and by the bioethics literature itself, it is helpful to understand the social, legal, political, and intellectual environment in which the Center and Institute developed.

The Rise of Scientific Medicine

Until penicillin and sulfa drugs were developed and introduced in the late 1930s, the scientific revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had yet to generate major advances in the treatment of disease. 3 The practice of medicine remained largely “empiric”—that is, based directly on physicians’ collective, historical observations of what helped patients, rather than on the scientific understanding of disease processes and how to affect them. Much of the physician’s work remained, by default, supportive and palliative. In comparison to our present health care system, public expenditures for medical care were minimal. Almost all physicians were private practitioners paid directly by their patients. The medical profession was essentially self-regulating, with legal regulation of medicine verging on the nonexistent. Hospitals were simple institutions compared to the complex behemoths we are all too familiar with today. And the traditional medical ethic, centered on the Hippocratic Oath and basically unchanged for twenty-five hundred years, continued to serve patients and physicians well.

Following World War II, the rate of scientific and therapeutic progress rapidly accelerated. Sulfa drugs and penicillin had saved countless lives during the war, which had also seen impressive advances in surgery and in the treatment of traumatic injuries. In the United States (and also in Europe), public and private funding of scientific research increased dramatically, fueled by expectations that further advances were just over the horizon. The highly visible and successful introduction of the polio vaccine in the early 1950s served to legitimize these expectations, which soared yet again. The era of modern medicine had begun in earnest.

Over the next two decades, unprecedented advances in the understanding and treatment of disease created an environment of almost unqualified optimism within the medical profession. Radiation therapy, chemotherapy, treatments for advanced heart disease, and hundreds of new and powerful drugs came into common use. With access to the diagnostic tools, medical treatments, surgical procedures, and technology of modern medicine, physicians considered themselves to be worthy opponents of the most devastating illnesses: pneumonia, heart disease, even cancer. Military metaphors came to pervade the language of medicine. Physicians “fight” or “combat” disease, which is the “enemy.” Bacteria “invade” the body, which has its own “defenses.” Radiation therapy “destroys” or “kills” tissues. The drugs available for use against cancer are referred to individually as “weapons,” collectively as an “armamentarium.” The research effort to discover cures for cancer came to be known as the “war on cancer.” 4 The battle against disease was being waged and—so it seemed—won.

In the exhilarating days of mid-twentieth-century medicine, physicians saw themselves as applied scientists who marshalled the diverse technical resources of modern medicine against the onslaught of disease. The physician’s exclusive tasks were to identify pathological processes and to determine which surgical and pharmacological interventions were necessary to eradicate disease and its symptoms. Physicians were trained to provide aggressive, unrelenting treatment for all diseases; only a patient’s death would signal defeat. 5

The human body belongs to the animal world. It is put together of tissues and organs, in their structure, origin, and development not essentially unlike what the biologist is otherwise familiar with; it grows, reproduces itself, decays, according to general laws. It is liable to attack by hostile physical and biological agencies; now struck with a weapon, again ravaged by parasites. (Flexner 1910 , p. 53) 6

Patients’ needs were thus defined medically, exclusively in terms of their diseases. The role of patients remained the same as it had been throughout the history of medicine: to trust their physicians and to submit passively to whatever treatments their physicians deemed appropriate. Except for the need to administer pain medications, physicians dismissed pain and suffering as merely subjective phenomena that were no more than the unfortunate and unavoidable consequences of disease. And since physicians’ overriding obligations remained—as they always had been—to diagnose and treat disease, the personal preferences of patients had no impact on, or relevance to, physicians’ medical decisions. Physicians’ authority over their patients was complete and absolute.

Patient Rights and Consumer Rights

Physicians’ inattention to patients’ subjective experiences and preferences proved to be one of the central shortcomings of scientific medicine. As early as the 1957 Salgo case, courts recognized that physicians’ unilateral decisions could lead to results at variance with patients’ own interests and goals. The plaintiff in Salgo had sued to recover damages for what he claimed was the negligent performance of a diagnostic procedure, an aortography, in which dye was injected into the aorta to determine whether it was blocked. On awakening the day after the procedure, his legs were paralyzed. In addition to the original complaint for negligence, the plaintiff later appended a further claim that his physicians had been negligent in failing to warn him of the risks associated with the procedure. In a decision that awarded damages to the plaintiff, the court announced a new legal doctrine— informed consent —that required physicians to provide patients with all relevant information about available treatment alternatives. It was the patient, not the physician, who should decide how to balance the risks and benefits associated with any particular procedure or treatment. In so restricting physicians’ traditional authority to control the course of medical treatment, the doctrine was specifically designed to ensure that patients’ preferences were incorporated into the process of making medical decisions.

Notwithstanding the Salgo case, events within the broader American society would prove to be the driving force behind, give a sense of mission to, and even substantially shape the bioethics movement. These developments would soon outpace Beecher and his efforts to mobilize the medical profession as the vanguard of a new medical ethic.

The right to safety—to be protected against the marketing of goods which are hazardous to health or life.

The right to be informed—to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or grossly misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given the facts he needs to make an informed choice.

The right to choose—to be assured, wherever possible, access to a variety of products and services at competitive prices; and in those industries in which competition is not workable and Government regulation is substituted, an assurance of satisfactory quality and service at fair prices.

The right to be heard—to be assured that consumer interests will receive full and sympathetic consideration in the formulation of Government policy, and fair and expeditious treatment in its administrative tribunals.

Consumers, by definition, include us all. They are the largest economic group in the economy, affecting and affected by almost every public and private economic decision. Two-thirds of all spending in the economy is by consumers. But they are the only important group in the economy who are not effectively organized, whose views are often not heard.

Additional legislative and administrative action is required . . . if the federal Government is to meet its responsibility to consumers in the exercise of their rights. . . . To promote the fuller realization of these consumer rights, it is necessary that existing Government programs be strengthened, that Government organization be improved, and, in certain areas, that new legislation be enacted.

But asserting a new role for the federal government was not the same thing as organizing consumers or giving them the voice that they lacked. That process was set in motion, however, by the 1965 publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed —the seminal event in the emergence of the consumer rights movement in the United States. Of special note was the ideology that the book brought to the marketplace of ideas—namely, that consumers should assert their ethical and legal rights against large and powerful corporations as a means of controlling them and protecting consumers from outright corporate misconduct and from poorly designed or unsafe products; such powerful organizations had shown themselves unworthy of the public’s trust. Suddenly, the skeletal framework of consumer rights described by President Kennedy took form in a movement that would change the power relationships between consumers and corporations—and, in time, between consumers and anyone providing them with goods or services, including professional services of any kind.

Applied Ethics and the Consolidation of Bioethics

During this same time period, American academics were becoming actively involved in issues of ethics and public policy, primarily but not exclusively as a result of widespread opposition within the academic community to the war in Vietnam. And the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice —considered by many philosophers the most important book of moral and political philosophy of the twentieth century—instilled in the philosophical community a sense of confidence that genuine progress was being made, and that more was to come. Rawls’s book was important in two ways, both of which fed this new sense of confidence. First, the book integrated a vast range of problems within the history of Western moral and political philosophy—problems that had often been discussed separately, without a broader sense of how they were related to other problems. Suddenly, as it were, the history of ethics and political philosophy could be understood as an integrated whole. Second, the book set forth a new way of thinking about ethical reasoning and of how to move from theoretical assumptions to actual ethical conclusions. That is, the book bridged ethical theory and normative ethics—theory and practice—in a way that brought dynamic new life to this area of philosophy.

But this philosophical honeymoon did not last long. A Theory of Justice generated a spectacular burst of philosophical activity, much supportive of Rawls’s theory and his arguments, but also much that was critical. More broadly, and despite its initial optimism, the philosophical community came to appreciate how difficult it was to make progress either in ethical theory or in normative ethics—that is, in using the tools of moral philosophy to analyze, solve, and reach consensus on problems encountered in the real world. The challenge of applying philosophical theory to normative problems was far more difficult than they had hoped.

It was during this same period of the 1970s, however, that the small but rapidly growing group of bioethicists—many of whom were associated, in one way or another, with the Hastings Center or Kennedy Institute—effectively separated themselves from the mainstream of moral philosophy and established what was to become the new discipline of bioethics. And, whereas academic moral philosophy had taken on a new modesty concerning what was coming to be called applied ethics , the new field of bioethics witnessed a burst of theory construction, concept formation, problem identification, and conceptual clarification of the kind associated with the formative period of any new field of study (Callahan 1973 ).

With surprising rapidity, this new academic discipline came to have its own training programs, research centers, journals, tenure-track positions, funding sources, professional organizations, and national and international conferences. Philosophers, sociologists, theologians, lawyers, commissions, courts, and legislatures were the new, and authoritative, voice for ethics in medicine. By the early 1980s, little over a decade after the founding of this new field, bioethics and bioethicists had come to dominate not only public discussions of health care ethics in the United States but also, increasingly, the teaching of ethics in medicine, public health, nursing, and all of the allied health professions. A decade later, in 1991, the International Association of Bioethics was founded. Signaling the worldwide reach of the bioethics movement, the inaugural World Congress of Bioethics took place the following year in the Netherlands. The thirteenth such conference, with 700 delegates from 44 countries, was held in Edinburgh in 2016.

As might be expected, given the society-wide ferment associated with the American consumer rights movement beginning in the late 1960s, the emerging bioethical paradigm placed the rights of patients—the consumers in medicine—at the center of its theorizing. In Unsafe at Any Speed , Nader had drawn attention to the challenge of “defining values relevant to . . . new technolog[ies] laden with risks,” and he noted that a “great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology” (Nader 1965 , p. vii). The public, moreover, did not have the expertise and information required to identify those harmful effects or the attendant risks. The question was whether the relevant actors—corporations in the case of the automobile, and doctors and the organized medical profession in the case of medicine—could or would identify and in some way address the “inherent but latent dangers” (p. vii). And just as Nader had identified the lack of public trust in automobile manufacturers and in their capacity to address safety issues on their own (pp. 248–249), so would the public perceive the entrenched interests of doctors, individually and also collectively as an organized profession, as a pervasive obstacle to be overcome in protecting the rights and interests of patients (Starr 1982 ).

In this context, Beecher’s two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine (Beecher 1966 , 1968 ) represented a fleeting instant in which the medical profession recognized, and came close to seizing, what might be called the ethical moment . Instead, the bioethics movement seized that moment for itself, and the medical profession and subsequently the other health care professions—ranging from nursing to social work to clinical psychology to public health—found that bioethicists had staked their own claim to knowing the path forward.

American Bioethics and Its (European) Discontents

It is perhaps not surprising that a movement with such distinctive American social and intellectual roots might run into some sort of resistance elsewhere. 7 As Amir Muzur notes in “European Bioethics: A New History Guaranteeing a New Future” ( 2017 ), through nearly the end of the twentieth century, the principlism at the core of American bioethics—the “Georgetown mantra” (p. 63) of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice—was a “globally predominant doctrine” (p. 61) that, even so, had been adopted only slowly and with ambivalence in Europe. There, as in America, ongoing advances in medicine presented a pressing need for substantive ethical discussion and for decisions on matters of public policy, but efforts to “Europeanise” bioethics by “revising the set of [four] principles” (p. 61) had yet to generate a new model to replace it. 8

Rolf Löther’s 1998 rediscovery of the work of Fritz Jahr, 9 a German theologian whose writings span the full second quarter of the twentieth century, set things on a new course (Jahr 1927 ). Jahr had used the term Bio - Ethik in establishing a bioethical imperative that was parallel to Kant’s categorical imperative ; it was a moral principle defining an ethical stance to the whole of nature, not just to one’s fellow humans. And Jahr himself saw this principle as the product of a long, ongoing European intellectual tradition. For the Europeans looking to find a new way forward, Jahr’s work was foundational, preceded the emergence of American bioethics, and set the stage for a distinctively European approach to the field. As Muzur notes ( 2017 ), Jahr’s work has generated a whole series of distinctive and separate national approaches—in Europe and beyond—that leave open whether some future consolidation, toward some shared or universal set of principles, will prove possible.

As a footnote to these ongoing developments (with uncertain outcome) in Europe, we think it worth noting that the discontinuity between Jahr’s work and American bioethics is deeper and more long-standing than the above summary suggests. Continental and Anglo-American philosophy broke off in separate directions after Kant (1724–1804). Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Husserl, and Heidegger are some of the leading figures on the Continental side, whereas Bentham, Mill, Russell, Ayer, and Wittgenstein are some on the Anglo-American side. The most tangible difference between these two lines of philosophy is that the latter is oriented toward language, science, and intellectual precision, whereas the former sees knowledge more broadly and would generally consider the ways of science as only one way—and at that, a very constrained or limited way—of understanding ourselves and the world. In that context, Jahr’s work has been, at least for Europeans, truly liberating, for it points to foundations in their own intellectual history that are unconnected with the Anglo-American roots of American bioethics.

The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights

For all the above activity in Europe—which is, to be sure, still playing itself out—the globally dominant conception of bioethics remains closely connected with principlism, the “Georgetown mantra.” The first nine of the fifteen articles of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2005 , include all of the original four principles from that principlist framework and draw out their consequences. The remaining six articles address broader social dimensions of bioethics not covered by the original four principles: respect for cultural diversity and pluralism (Article 12), solidarity and cooperation (Article 13), social responsibility and health (Article 14), sharing of benefits (Article 15), protecting future generations (Article 16), and protection of the environment, the biosphere, and biodiversity (Article 17). Few bioethicists would find reason to dispute any of these additions, and any bioethicist committed to the four principles would likely see these additional principles (except, perhaps, for the not-so-Anglo-American Article 13 on solidarity, which comes directly out of the French, not American, Revolution) as simple extensions or even consequences of the original four.

Ten years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, UNESCO published Global Bioethics: What For? ( 2015 ), a publication marking the twentieth anniversary of the organization’s Bioethics Programme. Although one does see in the essays some effort to move beyond principlism, its presence remains strong and confining. As noted in the volume’s introduction, the ongoing challenge for UNESCO’s Bioethics Programme is to implement the principles of the Universal Declaration and “to make the ethical principles a reality” (p. 8). In this context, one contributor—Jean Martin, a general-practice physician/clinician, not a bioethicist—notes that the principles of the Universal Declaration remain the “fundamental points of reference” for bioethical teaching and discusssion; bioethics itself, so conceived, with principles as the core, “must be a strong component in syllabuses—at schools, universities and professional or general training courses” (Martin 2015 , p. 30).

Whether one thinks in terms of the original four principles or the expanded set of principles in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, our concern remains the same. What happens when these sorts of ethical principles meet the very concrete world of clinical practice and the day-to-day clinical challenges of health professionals? That is the question we explore in the next two chapters.

“What I resent, and resent very deeply, is the idea that has been prevalent for the past seven years that patients have to be protected from physicians. This is a terrible, terrible thought to me. The best guardian that you can have of your welfare when you are ill with anything is your physicians.” From Sue Sprecher, “Psychosurgery Policy Soon to Be Set,” Real Paper , January 21, 1978. (as quoted in Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine , p. 390)

See David J. Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside ( 1991 ) for a full history of the bioethics movement’s first two decades.

One noteworthy exception concerned surgical interventions for the treatment of acute disease, an advance made possible by Lister’s work on antisepsis and the subsequent development of sterile surgical technique. Another was the development of a vaccine for smallpox.

There may be something of the American character in this. The United States also had a war on poverty and a war on drugs.

The medical profession’s difficulty in accepting that a patient is dying continues into the present day (Ivory 2016 ).

This quotation is taken from Abraham Flexner’s visionary, early-twentieth-century study of medical education, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching .

Here we have intentionally played on the title of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents .

For instance, while autonomy has been crucial for the Anglo-American culture ever since Independence, in Europe the principle of solidarity is more important. In Eastern-Asian bioethics, autonomy again happens to be interpreted in the Confucian sense, i.e. stressing the sovereignty of family instead of the individual which is similar to what we can observe in some African cultures as well.

Jahr’s most widely read essay is “Bio-Ethik. Eine Umschau überdie ethischen Beziehungen des Menschen zu Tier und Pflanze” ( 1927 ), translated under the title “Bio-Ethics. Reviewing the Ethical Relations of Humans Towards Animals and Plants” by Hans-Martin Sass in the Croatian journal JAHR ( 2010 ). The journal changed its subtitle from Annual of the Department of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities to European Journal of Bioethics in 2014 (volume 5), and may be, in library catalogs (including Harvard University’s Harvard Online Library Information System [HOLLIS]), located only under that title (not JAHR ). Jahr’s essays are available in English transition in Essays in Bioethics , 1924 – 1948 .

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Cite this Page Scher S, Kozlowska K. Rethinking Health Care Ethics [Internet]. Singapore: Palgrave Pivot; 2018. Chapter 3, The Rise of Bioethics: A Historical Overview. 2018 Aug 3. doi: 10.1007/978-981-13-0830-7_3
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Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study

By: Elizabeth Nix

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: May 16, 2017

Participants in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The Tuskegee experiment began in 1932, at a time when there was no known cure for syphilis, a contagious venereal disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in the project, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease.

The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.

The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, some 15 years into the study. PHS researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and instead, research was done at the Tuskegee Institute. (Now called Tuskegee University, the school was founded in 1881 with Booker T. Washington as its first teacher.)

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

In the mid-1960s, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, PHS officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it—with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed.

Buxton then leaked the story to a reporter friend, who passed it on to a fellow reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to finally shut down.

By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.

In 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. Additionally, new guidelines were issued to protect human subjects in U.S. government-funded research projects.

As a result of the Tuskegee experiment, many African Americans developed a lingering, deep mistrust of public health officials and vaccines. In part to foster racial healing, President Bill Clinton issued a 1997 apology, stating, “The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong… It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future.”

During his apology, Clinton announced plans for the establishment of Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care .

The final study participant passed away in 2004.

Herman Shaw speaks as President Bill Clinton looks on during ceremonies at the White House on May 16, 1997, during which Clinton apologized to the survivors and families of the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Tuskegee wasn't the first unethical syphilis study. In 2010, then- President Barack Obama and other federal officials apologized for another U.S.-sponsored experiment, conducted decades earlier in Guatemala. In that study, from 1946 to 1948, nearly 700 men and women—prisoners, soldiers and mental patients—were intentionally infected with syphilis (hundreds more people were exposed to other sexually transmitted diseases as part of the study) without their knowledge or consent.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether penicillin could prevent, not just cure, syphilis infection. Some of those who became infected never received medical treatment. The results of the study, which took place with the cooperation of Guatemalan government officials, were never published. The American public health researcher in charge of the project, Dr. John Cutler, went on to become a lead researcher in the Tuskegee experiments.

Following Cutler’s death in 2003, historian Susan Reverby uncovered the records of the Guatemala experiments while doing research related to the Tuskegee study. She shared her findings with U.S. government officials in 2010. Soon afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius issued an apology for the STD study and President Obama called the Guatemalan president to apologize for the experiments.

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Search engines are failing. Research methods classes need to catch up

The likes of google are being undermined by both ai and their own commercial imperatives. researchers can no longer rely on them, says andy farnell.

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Universities all around the world teach a course called “research methods”. This mixes philosophy of science and epistemology with hypothesis formulation, significance testing and a study of quality, quantity and bias in statistics. I’ve taught it quite a few times. It’s an important bedrock of academic research. But it needs to catch up with the horrors of the modern digital age.

Internet searching has become a central research methodology for all academics. All modern research rests on an assumption of some accessible network of information “out there”. Sure, academics have better tools at their disposal than the average web user, including private databases for searching out papers. Mainly, though, everyone uses the traditional advanced features of common search engines, such as Boolean operators , sorting and filtering.

Recently, the quality of search results across all popular engines has fallen, however, and we need to ask whether university research, as currently taught, can survive.

The original world wide web page , produced by Cern, depicts a very different paradigm from today’s “web”, describing the pioneering venture as an “information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents”. However, you would be unlikely to easily find things just following the links from one URL to another as you did in Gopher, the predecessor of the modern web. Hence, in the early days of the web, search engines built indexes by “crawling” the network with their “spiders”, looking for content.

That worked reasonably well before artificial “intelligence” went mainstream. But, today, content is generated, “on the fly”, as it were – and the spiders can’t catch these flies. They are no sooner there than gone. This is partly because of the mushrooming glut of low-grade content spam spewed out by aggressively search engine-optimised (SEO) link farms (designed to boost the ranking of a particular website – usually a commercial one – in search engine results).

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In a longitudinal investigation of SEO spam in search engines, a recently published Leipzig Uni v ersity study of about 8,000 product queries suggested that all search engines have significant problems with this SEO spam drowning out useful information. Google’s response amounted to, “Well, we’re still doing a little better than the other search engines that are failing”.

The spammers can instruct a large language model, such as ChatGPT, to spin a piece of advertising copy into 100,000 articles, each introducing the product under a different subject lead-in, such as cookery, sports, medicine, pet care, and then create 100,000 websites to host it that are indistinguishable to search engines from organic content even though they are poorly written and full of errors. Troll farms can do something similar to promote disinformation.

Traditional URLs are “universal resource locators” but get replaced by internalised tracking links, which redirect a URL so as to track whether it is shared, and with whom, or shortened URLs, or are simply hallucinated by the “AI” generators, so the number of dead links in circulation is rising. This means that even if Google were the most benevolent of gatekeepers, it still couldn’t sort wheat from the chaff.

But it isn’t the most benevolent of gatekeepers: in common with other search engines, its business priorities have long since turned away from users toward advertisers.

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Google’s flaws matter enormously because of its dominance. Despite being only one window into the vast public network of URLs, through which any traveller could freely walk, Google has set itself up as the sole gatekeeper (apart from its wannabee, Bing). We coined the verb “to google”, meaning to consult one special URL as a path to all others – even if even Google’s mighty spider can’t penetrate the worldwide walls built by its Silicon Valley neighbours, the social media companies.

Once Google established its dominance, it’s fair to say that the organic web, and cultural knowledge of roads through it, died. So much so that even in university research methods classes, students still get told to use Google or Bing as first port of call.

But surely this must end given the increasing uselessness of the results these engines throw up. For too long, we've free-ridden on commercial applications instead of building solid, home-grown information systems that also serve the public interests. We need to revise the idea of search and reconsider what tools are really best for it. We need to start confronting students with the reality of the internet as it actually is, rather than as it was idealised in the 1990s.

Andy Farnell has been a visiting and associate professor in signals, systems and cybersecurity at a range of European universities. With Helen Plews and Ed Nevard, he now co-hosts The Cybershow , which seeks to restore understanding, safer use and control of everyday technology to ordinary people.

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What Is Research Ethics
Lecture 4 history and ethical codes
Principles & History of Research Ethics: Human Subjects, Animals, and other Areas
History of Research Ethics: Case Studies
Principles & History of Research Ethics: Human Subjects, Animals, and other Areas
History of Research Ethics and Requirements

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History of Research Ethics
The declaration governs international research ethics and defines rules for "research combined with clinical care" and "non-therapeutic research.". The Declaration of Helsinki was revised in 1975, 1983, 1989, and 1996 and is the basis for effective clinical practices used today. Research with humans should be based on the results from ...
The history of research ethics
The history of research ethics. Throughout the ages - and especially after the scientific revolution in the 17th century - the behaviour of researchers has been subject to some form of regulations that have reflected the normative system prevailing within the research community. In addition, researchers have also sought to show respect for ...
What Is Ethics in Research and Why Is It Important?
Codes and Policies for Research Ethics. Given the importance of ethics for the conduct of research, it should come as no surprise that many different professional associations, government agencies, and universities have adopted specific codes, rules, and policies relating to research ethics.
Research Ethics
Multiple examples of past unethical research studies conducted in the past throughout the world have cast a significant historical shadow on research involving human subjects. Examples include the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 to 1972, Nazi medical experimentation in the 1930s and 1940s, and research conducted at the Willowbrook State School in the 1950s and 1960s.[1] As the aftermath of ...
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: Research Ethics
A research ethics timeline from 1620 to present. Note: This list is the authors' own interpretation of some important events in the history of research ethics and does not include every event that some people might regard as important.
Ethics in scientific research: a lens into its importance, history, and
Introduction. Ethics are a guiding principle that shapes the conduct of researchers. It influences both the process of discovery and the implications and applications of scientific findings 1.Ethical considerations in research include, but are not limited to, the management of data, the responsible use of resources, respect for human rights, the treatment of human and animal subjects, social ...
An Introduction to Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity
Abstract. This chapter outlines the aims for the handbook. A main aim is to be a first point of contact for contemporary information, issues, and challenges in the fields of research ethics and scientific integrity. It is aimed at researchers, reviewers, and policymakers to help them pursue the best ways forward in seeking ethics and integrity ...
The Ethics of Research, Writing, and Publication
According to Resnik (2011), many people think of ethics as a set of rules distinguishing right from wrong, but actually the term "ethics" refers to norms of conduct or of action and in disciplines of study. Research ethics or norms promote the "knowledge, truth, and avoidance of error" (p. 1) and protect against "fabricating ...
Understanding Research Ethics
Research ethics are moral principles that need to be adhered to when conducting a research study as well as when writing a scientific article, with the prime aim of avoiding deception or intent to harm study's participants, the scientific community, and society. Practicing and adhering to research ethics is essential for personal integrity as ...
Research Ethics Codes and Guidelines
The history of research ethics codes can be divided into two separate topics: first, the history of codes of ethics as formal documents, and second, the history of research ethics which includes the historical development of underlying principles and ideas. The principles and ideas included in a code might be much older than the code itself.
Introduction: What is Research Ethics?
Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. It is clear that research ethics should include: Protections of human and animal subjects. However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research ...
PDF Research Ethics Handbook: Philosophy, History and Theory
Research Ethics Handbook Version 1.1 Page 4 Revised May 2015 1 Philosophy of research ethics Plato (427 - 347BCE) was a student of Socrates and in his writing transmits Socrates' teachings. The main thrust of this comes in his middle and later periods, the Republic being the most important.
Revisiting the Ethics of Research on Human Subjects
The ethics of clinical research on human subjects has a rich history that belies its relatively recent development in the mid-twentieth century, marked by publications such as the Nuremberg Code [1], Henry Beecher's landmark 1966 paper "Ethics and Clinical Research" [2], the Belmont Report [3], and the Declaration of Helsinki [4].
Evolution of Ethics in Clinical Research and Ethics Committee
Abstract. Ethics are the moral values of human behavior and the principles which govern these values. The situation becomes challenging for a doctor when he assumes the role of researcher. The doctor-researcher has to serve both the roles and at times the zeal of an investigator has the potential to cloud the morality of the physician inside.
A short history of research ethics.
Most textbooks begin their coverage of research ethics with the Nuremburg Code. There is also early evidence that physicians used ethical considerations in research with humans when making decisions in the proper conduct of human experimentation. The idea of conducting medical research on animals before conducting it on humans was promoted by William Osler, a professor at Johns Hopkins.
What is Research Ethics?
Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. It is clear that research ethics should include: Protections of human and animal subjects. However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research subjects.
History of Research Ethics
The Declaration governs international research ethics and defines rules for "research combined with clinical care" and "non-therapeutic research." The Declaration of Helsinki was revised in 1975, 1983, 1989 and 1996 and is the basis for Good Clinical Practices used today. Issues addressed in the Declaration of Helsinki include:
Ethical Considerations in Research
Revised on June 22, 2023. Ethical considerations in research are a set of principles that guide your research designs and practices. Scientists and researchers must always adhere to a certain code of conduct when collecting data from people. The goals of human research often include understanding real-life phenomena, studying effective ...
The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics
This article proposes a history of research ethics focused on the "scientific self," that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competencies, qualities, or dispositions. Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology, the article argues that the ...
Ethics
The term ethics may refer to the philosophical study of the concepts of moral right and wrong and moral good and bad, to any philosophical theory of what is morally right and wrong or morally good and bad, and to any system or code of moral rules, principles, or values. The last may be associated with particular religions, cultures, professions, or virtually any other group that is at least ...
PDF History of Ethics
guiding medical doctors in biomedical research involving human participants. The Declaration governs international research ethics and defines rules for "research combined with clinical care" and "non-therapeutic research." The Declaration of Helsinki was revised in 1975, 1983, 1989 and 1996 and is the basis for Good Clinical Practices used today.
History of ethics
history of ethics, history of the philosophical discipline concerned with what is morally good or bad and what is morally right or wrong. The history of ethics encompasses the development of substantive ethical theories from which particular moral judgments may follow, as well as more general understandings of the nature of ethical theories and of moral judgments themselves.
Scarcity of Medical Ethics Research in Allergy and Immunology: A Review
Medical ethics is relevant to the clinical practice of allergy and immunology regardless of the type of patient, disease state, or practice setting. When engaging in clinical care, performing research, or enacting policies on the accessibility and distribution of healthcare resources, physicians regularly make and justify decisions using the fundamental principles of medical ethics.
The Rise of Bioethics: A Historical Overview
Modest Beginnings . The modern era of health care ethics is often traced to Henry Beecher's influential, 1966 article on ethical problems in clinical research, with particular attention (through a series of actual examples) to the failure to inform patients of the risks involved in experimental treatments (Beecher 1966).Beecher, a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, soon ...
Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study
During his apology, Clinton announced plans for the establishment of Tuskegee University's National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. The final study participant passed away in 2004.
[PDF] The Ethical Principles in Ethical Guidance Documents during the
Ten main ethical principles were identified, namely: fairness, honesty, minimizing harm, proportionality, responsibility, autonomy, respect, informed decision making, duty of care, and reciprocity in ethical guidance documents published in the UK and Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic. BACKGROUND The sudden onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was accompanied by a myriad ...
Ethics of Medical Research: Nuremberg Code in History
Most important document in the history of the ethics of medical research. Formulated in 1945 August. It served as a blueprint for today's principles that ensures the rights of subjects in research. e.g.,the principle of non-maleficence cannot be satisfied medical context because pain and other harms are inflicted on patients during diagnostic ...
Proposing planetary education
Drawing from previous research on Biodesign as a tool for effective science communication, this study expands upon the concept, positioning Biodesign as a pedagogical approach for holistic education. This project advocates and argues for the establishment of a novel pedagogy with biodesign principles as a transformative approach at its core. In the current climate, both atmospheric and social ...
Historical criminology and colonialism: History Australia: Vol 0, No 0
Historical criminology, developing over the last few decades as a defined field of inquiry, has had a recent renaissance, resulting in the publication of leading texts, edited collections and scholarship, setting agendas for its methodologies and impact. We discuss the epistemological and methodological focus of this body of literature, which ...
Search engines are failing. Research methods classes need to catch up
Universities all around the world teach a course called "research methods". This mixes philosophy of science and epistemology with hypothesis formulation, significance testing and a study of quality, quantity and bias in statistics. I've taught it quite a few times. It's an important bedrock of academic research.

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