Column from July/August 2001 issue of ASPB News. Links to supporting material not included in the printed newsletter are provided at the bottom of this page in PDF format.*

"Mokita": The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea (continued from the May/June 2001 issue of the ASPB News)

The room was very quiet. This doctoral candidate's suicide resulted from an unresolved bioethical dilemma with the candidate's principal investigator (PI). Several of the Ph.D. candidates around the table became very red-eyed or actually began to cry quietly. The tension was tangible. I gulped.

We talked about the guilt of the PI, the complexity interjected into the relationship between the postdoc who told us the story and the PI, and the ripple effect that this event had on the department. We talked about the warning signs of depression and how to intervene on behalf of a depressed person. We shared stories of professional conflict in the labs of those around the table and eventually worked back around to finish the case studies.

Bioethical issues in science have been mokita. We teach the nuts and bolts of science-how to make a poster, etc.-as if the scientific process was devoid of human beings and completely insulated from society. None of my training in science had prepared me for how to deal with this incident. As scientists, we are not educated in bioethics and, by and large, we in turn are not educating our students about these issues. We do not take the time. This incident opened my eyes to what bioethics is and why it is imperative that we as scientists and human beings change the status quo.

As scientists we have a responsibility to ourselves, our students, and our society to deal openly and actively with the burgeoning awareness of the impact of modern science on our lives. Bioethical issues are wrapped into many pressing societal issues. For example-

• public awareness of what we do and why we do it (the public pays for our research, so it is incumbent on us to teach them what we are learning)
• what we teach in schools (creationism and/or evolution?)
• what we eat, both the genetic make-up and rearing of plant and animal foods
• our interactions with the public, especially The Greens and ecoterrorist group
• the short- and long-term ecological ramifications of bioengineering
• bioremediation, including global warming, of soils, water, and air
• the ethical use of genomics data in providing a uniformly distributed food supply
• medical consequences of bioengineering (how much science do you apply to prolong or preserve life?)
• evolutionary consequences of tampering with our own gene pool (saving genetic lineages that cannot reproduce without scientific intervention, in vitro fertilization).

Next issue: Bioethics in the grocery store.
See http://www.aspb.org/membersinaction/bioethics.cfm for additional supporting materials and to read Bioethics Imperative I, which was featured in the May/June 2001 issue of the ASPB News.

Dina Mandoli
University of Washington, Seattle
mandoli@u.washington.edu

Supporting materials can be found HERE.