Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [115]
Thanks to the post-war whitewash, a cloud also hangs over our ethics boards. The very committees that were meant to avoid a repeat of atrocities and murder have, in some cases, caused thousands of deaths through bureaucratic delays. Ethics committees were set up at the same time as scientists and governments were seeking to dispel public fears about the scientist’s sense of responsibility, so they were always going to be overcautious. The acts that precipitated the Nuremberg Code took place in extraordinary circumstances that no longer apply (and no amount of regulation on ethics would prevent anyone intent on such acts from carrying them out). Just as ‘the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’, ethics committees are meant to serve science. Science is not meant to be enslaved to their ever-widening remit.
The medical literature contains many studies of the performance of ethical review panels that highlight the problems they can cause. A study in Scotland, for instance, approached nineteen committees and found that fifteen of them had designed their own application forms, creating an inconsistent, time-consuming system where applications were subject to the whims and particular interests of those on the committee. Some committees required researchers to submit twenty copies of the documentation, and the time taken for final approval varied from 39 to 182 days – on average, it took three months for researchers to get the go-ahead. Perhaps the most worrying finding was that the final decisions tended to depend on the personal moral stance of the committee members.
It is easy to see why scientists seek ways to sidestep ethics committees. Lives have been lost because of the administrative burden imposed: when one committee delayed a trial designed to test new drugs for heart attacks, around 10,000 people died unnecessarily. As a 2004 editorial in the British Medical Journal pointed out, ‘The burdens imposed by ethics review might be justified if it could be shown that, on balance, it does more good than harm to patients’ interests. Delays may, however, have important consequences and sometimes jeopardise the interests of patients.’
The scientists’ attempts to paint their field whiter than white, putting on their ‘anxious to please’ face, as Jacob Bronowski described it, have contributed to this over-cautiousness. But, in the light of what we now know about the way scientists work, ethics committees would do well to focus on their own flaws. There is very little evidence that scientists are prone to conducting unethical experiments by choice – they have to publish, discuss and defend these results before their peers and the wider public. They also have to look to the next round of grant applications: when the focus is your own career, your own rise to the top of the field, performing experiments that put others in danger is akin to shooting yourself in the foot.
Then there is the issue of science education. How do we inspire the next generation of scientists? Since the 1950s, the public face of science has been dull, spiritless and cautious. Scientists have taken a back seat in society and culture, allowing rock stars, sportsmen and – women, and fame-hungry TV celebrities to win the attention of our children. And we wonder why these naturally curious children, who displayed a delight with science in primary school, show disaffection and lack of interest by the time their eleventh birthdays come around. Once they become aware of what is valued, what is deemed exciting, in the wider world, science loses its lustre. If the high-school students of today were permitted to learn – perhaps through scientists taking a more honest approach with the media – what science and scientists are really like, the days of a