montreal

If scientific discoveries threaten to outstrip efforts to place their application in an ethical context, “science will need to wait and to help ethics to catch up”, according to a leading Canadian bioethicist.

Margaret A. Somerville, a law professor at McGill University's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law in Montreal, says that “science time, medical time, business time, political time and ethics time” are on different scales, and that “this can be a source of serious difficulty in doing ethics regarding our new science”.

She points out that scientists “have an enormous drive and enthusiasm for discovery”, and that business also wants to proceed as quickly as possible, while politicians are subject to the ‘do something’ pressure of the electorate, especially in relation to threats to health or life, such as the shortage of organs for transplants.

“In contrast, ‘doing ethics’ in relation to the new science may not be able to be speeded up. There may be an irreducible minimum time needed both to obtain the necessary facts on which to base good ethics, and for a ‘sedimentation-of-values’ process to take place.”

She also suggests that a minimum amount of time is needed for the public to become familiar with the meaning of a scientific development in terms of its potential benefits, risks and harm, “not only at the physical level, but also at the level of its potential impact on values, norms, traditions, customs, cultures, beliefs, attitudes, and so on”.

Somerville argues that there is a difference between simply delivering information on ethics to the public, and engaging the public in discussion about a new technology. “The latter takes time. Indeed, how to engage the public adequately and effectively in ‘ethics talk’ is a difficult question.”

The instant worldwide access to scientific developments also raises ethical issues, she argues. For example, countries that lack the research infrastructure needed to develop xenotransplantation can use this technology when it has been developed elsewhere.

“But they might not do so safely for either the research subject/patients involved, or the public, and they may not do so ethically. In short, many new scientific techniques, such as xenotransplantation, need universal ethical regulation.”

Full text: http://helix.nature.com/wcs/c13.html