Gareth Roberts Science Policy Lecture 2013:
8th October 6pm, The Law Society, Chancery Lane.
Professor Onora O'Neill
Why Science needs Ethics: why science cannot and should not aspire to be value free.
http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/gareth-roberts-science-policy-lecture-2013
It was a pleasure to listen to Prof O’Neill. No slides just a well rehearsed reading of an essay. I felt more as if I was in a lecture at Cambridge Uni than I did a public seminar -especially at the law society: dead posh - but that is no bad thing. Although the title was "Why science needs ethics" it was less about why science needs ethics but a description of what “norms” do we have in the scientific community and how or from what did they get formed. For more discussion on norms click here http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/418412/normative-ethics
A video of the talk will be posted on the science council website shortly.
I will try and summarise the talk below and highlight a couple of points that the IPEM community might want to consider.
Prof O’Neill reminded us that the adage “science is and should be ‘value free’” is now “old hat”. It is well recognised that the scientific community is governed by standards that could be described as ethical standards and that these standards have arisen from norms not empirical claims.
Norms are essential for an organised society and the scientific community is definitely an organised something; with units of measurement, language, methods, techniques, peer reviewed publication,
including value norms such as honesty and integrity, and aesthetic norms: simplicity and elegance.
The professor went on to ask the question how then can science influence societal norms rather than societal norms influence the scientific community. She advocated for a more open transparent means for the public to access scientific data and that we had a responsibility – an ethical responsibility – to make sure that our work is intelligible to a lay audience and that we should not run from opposing views, purporting neutrality, but to confront what we consider to be unfounded facts. Think of homeopathy and climate change debates.
But lets face it, as scientists, we don’t particularly like to get into public spats in the media which is where they usually end up. It seems somehow undignified and yet public debates in almost every other field; think the today programme on Radio4 - arts and humanities, is common place and expected.
It was a thought provoking hour: I wanted to ask a question related to how should science react to the challenge of influencing societal norms when research such as that of David Nutt gets shut down by government because it doesn’t fit with current policy i.e. current societal norms. But it came out wrong and I ended up asking how we should react to government dictating what research should be carried out, which seemed to be asking the question about government only providing funding to what they are interested in e.g David Cameron and Dementia. There wasn’t really an answer to that except that may be scientists should be not only cross-disciplinary in their approach to researching a problem but also cross-disciplinary in their approach to acquiring funding.
The discussion ended on a personally interesting note – almost as an aside to another question – be careful of allowing personally interested Lay people to polarise the debate. I think this is of pertinent interest right now in the IPEM community. As scientists and engineers in healthcare we are being asked more and more to consider the patients point of view and seeing patients being represented on committees to discuss new healthcare technology (particularly in cancer treatment). While I advocate whole heartedly that our first duty to healthcare is safety of the patients, carers and staff I think we can all think of instances where a mis-understanding of the science and technology can lead to unnecessary worry and/or in-appropriate decisions. So as a community do we need to step up and do more to educate the public in healthcare technology? And if so, how do we go about doing that with the resources we have?
No comments:
Post a Comment