That was what today's lecture in Practice of Science was about. I found this to be a very interesting topic, especially with a lot of the controversy between science and religion having to do with research; mainly stem cell research and cloning. But I'll get to that in a second.
In the science realm, conducting research and gaining credit for it are nasty processes that cause great pains, as my teacher puts it. I had no idea how ruthless it was in the scienctific world, meaning the science community that conducts research for the furtherance of knowledge and betterment of humanity.
Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) is basically the universal law of research and science in the USA; the code of ethics for science differs in each country, as you can imagine, due to the different backgrounds and cultures of each country. The RCR has this whole code for publishing and researching, laws for research, ethic law, processes that need to be approved before research, etc. to keep the researching world in line with a good ethical code; well, the good ethical code defined by scientists. The main concern for the RCR is research conducted on animals and especially, humans.
The reason for the RCR first started back in 1932 with the Tuckegee Syphilis Study in Alabama. Basically a team of researchers selected 399 poor , black males that had syphilis to test what would happen if these men were untreated with curable prescriptions and treated with different chemicals (I say chemicals because they were not approved medicines with one of the treatments having to give the "patients" doses of arsenic). Remember, this was in the middle of the Great Depression with anyone willing to do anything for food, shelter, or just a little bit of cash, which sounds really good when a team of scientists invite you to come live in their research facility for 40 years with free food and accommodations, telling you that you just have this rare blood disease that will be treated in those 40 years. The experiments were somewhat similar to those the Nazis used on Jews and other test subjects, with experimentation of chemicals and unauthorized drugs to see what would happen to the Syphilis.
This study was started because the Syphilis epidemic in the South in the 1930s with no effective treatment yet discovered around the late 1940s. When the drug was found to treat and effectively suppress Syphilis these 399 males were excluded from this treatment to see what would happen to them if Syphilis was left untouched. It was finally leaked out in 1972 and the study was shut down with the results disclosed. The debate in the scientific world is whether those results should continued to be left in the dark or published for the "good of many".
Today the controversy is not Syphilis but stem cell research and cloning. Where is the line drawn? Where do ethics come in and say, "this is going too far"? In the scientific perspective, this is just research that can benefit mankind, which it could possibly do with stem cells being used to help grow cells that have once been destroyed by specific and, currently, incurable diseases as well as a better treatment for cancer.......but to get the stem cells scientists need fertilized human eggs and then comes the question well isn't that a live human being or is it just a group of developing cells....I'm not going to get into that because that would take like 4 posts to try and summarize, the point is which code of ethics applies...scientific (just research) or the common religious opinion (that's a human being, not a test variable)?
Cloning is the other hot topic in scientific research....man creating man instead of God creating man (man being used for the term humanity, women are also included of course). God creates
man with a soul, so if man creates man does he have a soul? These were questions that I thought of in class today......Do cloned persons have souls? Do they have personalities? I know these are not too important questions and I have an opinion on these matters but was just seeing what anyone else thought and I thought these were interesting questions and topics (with stem cell research, cloning, code of ethics for both, etc.), being a science person in all........well, kind of.....
