My students don't use humans or animals in research
Q: I was looking over the proposed assignments for your course and although the issues related to human and animal subjects are undoubtedly very important to the life sciences, they may not be very interesting to the majority of civil engineers.
What percentage of your time do you intend to spend addressing these issues?
A: This is a difficult issue for us.
We recognize that some our students, including many of those in the engineering disciplines, will not be using humans or animals in research. So we have thought carefully about how much time to devote to each subject.
Our current plan is to mention the importance of ethical guidelines for those using animal subjects in research. However, for every student who is now--or who eventually may--use animals in research, much more preparation is required. We will require all students engaging in such momentous, potentially harmful, work, to complete our module on the subject.
We also plan to introduce everyone to the history of researchers' abuse of humans in order to explain contemporary concerns about research ethics and how current standards of research ethics have evolved. In this context, we mention, albeit briefly, the abuses that occurred during the Nazi medical experiments and the US Public Health Service syphillis trials at Tuskegee.
All students using humans in research must be adequately prepared for this task and we will require them to complete an extensive online tutorial on the subject.
Send us your comments!
Andrew Hirsch (Physics, Purdue), writes:
As to the questions: "Should the use of humans and animals be covered in the core?" I would say "yes, if time permits." These topics raise important issues that our students should be able to discuss in some reasonably knowledgeable manner, even if their immediate research involves neither humans or animals.