19 Chapter 16 Research Methods
Ethics is defined by Webster’s dictionary as conformance to the standards of conduct of a given profession or group. Such standards are often defined at a disciplinary level though a professional code of conduct, and sometimes enforced by university committees called even Institutional Review Board. Even if not explicitly specified, scientists are still expected to be aware of and abide by general agreements shared by the scientific community on what constitutes acceptable and non-acceptable behaviors in the professional conduct of science. For instance, scientists should not manipulate their data collection, analysis, and interpretation procedures in a way that contradicts the principles of science or the scientific method or advances their personal agenda.
Why is research ethics important? Because, science has often been manipulated in unethical ways by people and organizations to advance their private agenda and engaging in activities that are contrary to the norms of scientific conduct. A classic example is pharmaceutical giant Merck’s drug trials of Vioxx, where the company hid the fatal side -effects of the drug from the scientific community, resulting in 3468 deaths of Vioxx recipients, mostly from cardiac arrest. In 2010, the company agreed to a $4.85 billion settlement and appointed two independent committees and a chief medical officer to monitor the safety of its drug development process. Merck’s conduct was unethical and violation the scientific principles of data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
Ethics is the moral distinction between right and wrong, and what is unethical may not necessarily be illegal. If a scientist’s conduct falls within the gray zone between ethics and law, she may not be culpable in the eyes of the law, but may still be ostracized in her professional community, face severe damage to professional reputation, and may even lose her job on grounds of professional misconduct. These ethical norms may vary from one society to another, and here, we refer to ethical standards as applied to scientific research in Western countries.
Ethical Principles in Scientific Research
Some of the expected tenets of ethical behavior that are widely accepted within the scientific community are as follows.
Voluntary participation and harmlessness. Subjects in a research project must be aware that their participation in the study is voluntary, that they have the freedom to withdraw from the study at any time without any unfavorable consequences, and they are not harmed as a result of their participation or non-participation in the project. The most flagrant violations of the voluntary participation principle are probably forced medical experiments conducted by Nazi researchers on prisoners of war during World War II, as documented in the post-War Nuremberg Trials (these experiments also originated the term “crimes against humanity”). Less known violations include the Tuskegee syphilis experiments