A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Month: August 2015

Ethics research keeps ethical practices alive (new dissertation)

Pär SegerdahlI have in two posts complained about a tendency of ethical practices to begin to idle, as if they were ends in themselves.

A risk with the tendency is that bioethics is discredited and attacked as no more than an unhappy hindrance to novel research.

Like when Steven Pinker recently wrote that the primary moral goal for bioethics today should be:

But there is a way to go: self-scrutinizing ethics research.

Bioethics is often misunderstood as merely a fixed and finished framework of ethical rules, principles and review systems: as a cumbersome bureaucracy. I guess that is how Pinker understands it.

But first, the “framework” is the result of novel ethical thinking at a time when we had reason to rethink the position of science. Doing research is important, but it does not justify exploiting research participants. There are other values ​​than Science, which scientists should take seriously.

Secondly, this ethical thinking will never be finished. There are always new problems to subject to self-scrutinizing ethics research.

Not infrequently these problems are occasioned by the bioethical framework. Pregnant women and children are routinely excluded from research, on ethical grounds. But does not the protection of these groups as research participants mean that they are exposed to risks as patients? If new drugs are tested only on adult males, we don’t know what doses a pregnant woman or an infant should receive.

We need self-critical ethics research, to keep ethics alive and to avoid idling.

Therefore, I formulate a different imperative than the one Steven Pinker suggests. Bioethics main goal should be: Think anew, reflect critically, do ethics research!

We follow that imperative at CRB. An example is Tove Godskesen’s thesis,

which will be defended on Friday, August 28, at 09:15, in room A1:107a at BMC (Biomedical Centre, Husargatan 3, Uppsala, Sweden).

This thesis is not about standing in the way of cancer research, but about doing empirical-ethical research to examine how well the ethical practices work when cancer patients are recruited as participants in such forms of research.

Do the patients understand the information they receive about the research? Do they understand that the possibility that they will be cured through research participation is extremely low? Do they understand that cancer research involves certain risks? Do they understand what a randomized study is?

And why do they volunteer as research participants? Because they hope for a new miracle drug? Because they want to help future patients? As thanks for the help they received? Because they feel a duty towards relatives, or because of (perceived) expectations from the doctor?

All these questions are empirically studied in the thesis.

Godskesen’s dissertation also contains reflections on the concept of hope. Her empirical studies show that it is precisely the patients with the least chance to be cured – those who don’t have much time left, and who usually are asked to participate in Phase 1 clinical studies – who primarily are motivated by the hope of a cure, at the last moment.

How should we view this fact? Does it mean that these participants misunderstand the study they have chosen to participate in, and thus participate on false premises? Or is it a hope which gives meaning at the end of life, a hope which might be nourished even if you understand the study design?

These are questions we cannot “step out of the way” of. Tove Godskesen does not step out of their way. Come and listen on Friday (but observe that the examination will be conducted in Swedish)!

Pär Segerdahl

In dialogue with patients

Idling normativity

Pär SegerdahlI recently wrote about the tendency of ethical practices to lose their vital functions and degenerate into empty rituals. Why is there such a tendency?

The tendency is not unique to ethics: it is everywhere.

Suddenly, patients and students are to be called “customers” and be treated “as” customers. This can be perceived as an imposed language, as empty rituals that demean all concerned.

Since the edict to treat a variety of relationships “as” customer relationships can be experienced as demeaning, expanding customer normativity has become a problem even where it has its rightful place: in our stores, where we really are customers.

A retail chain – I will not say which – is now instructing their employees to call their customers “guests” and to treat them “as” guests!

The retail chain “solves” the problem of expanding customer normativity by decreeing guest normativity at precisely the place where customer normativity should work authentically.

I don’t know why we so easily go astray in our own forms of normativity, but I have a name for the phenomenon: idling normativity.

Pär Segerdahl

Minding our language - the Ethics Blog

Openness as an ethical ritual

Pär SegerdahlBarbara A. Koenig wrote last year about how informed consent has acquired a “liturgical feel” in biomedical research ethics. Each time the protection of research participants is challenged by new forms of research, the answer is: more consent!

The procedure of informing and asking for consent may feel like assuming a priestly guise and performing an ethical ritual with the research participant.

The ritual is moreover sometimes practically impossible to implement. For example, if one is to inform participants in genetic research about incidental findings that might be made about them, so that they can decide whether they want to be re-contacted if researchers happen to discover “something” about them.

If it takes one hour to inform a patient about his or her actual genetic disease, how long would it take to inform a research participant of all possible kinds of genetic disease risks that might be discovered? Sorry, not just one participant, but hundreds of thousands.

How then can research participants be respected as humans, if informed consent has become like an empty ritual with the poor participant? (A ritual that in genetic research sometimes is impracticable.)

In the August issue of Nature, Misha Angrist suggests a solution: we treat participants as partners in the research process, by being open to them. How are we open to them? By offering them the researchers’ genetic raw data, which can be handed over to them as an electronic file.

Here we are not talking about interpreted genetic disease risks, but of heaps of genetic raw data that are utterly meaningless for research participants.

Openness often has important functions. Making scientific articles openly accessible so that everyone can read them has a function. Making researchers’ data available to other researchers so that they can critically review research, or use already collected data in new research, has a function.

But offering files with genetic raw data to research participants, what is its function? Is it really the beginning of a beautiful partnership?

Openness and partnership seem here to become yet another ethical ritual; yet another universal solution to ethical difficulties.

Pär Segerdahl

We think about bioethics : www.ethicsblog.crb.uu.se