Guiding Ethical Principles in Engineering Biology Research.

Engineering biology is being applied toward solving or mitigating some of the greatest challenges facing society. As with many other rapidly advancing technologies, the development of these powerful tools must be considered in the context of ethical uses for personal, societal, and/or environmental advancement. Researchers have a responsibility to consider the diverse outcomes that may result from the knowledge and innovation they contribute to the field. Together, we developed a Statement of Ethics in Engineering Biology Research to guide researchers as they incorporate the consideration of long-term ethical implications of their work into every phase of the research lifecycle. Herein, we present and contextualize this Statement of Ethics and its six guiding principles. Our goal is to facilitate ongoing reflection and collaboration among technical researchers, social scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to support best outcomes in engineering biology innovation and development.

Advancements in uterus transplant: new scenarios and future implications.

Women suffering from Uterine Factor Infertility (UFI) arising from congenital conditions (e.g., Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome) or hysterectomy can fulfill their wish to achieve motherhood only by resorting to surrogacy, which is, however, banned in most countries. Medical research has long been looking into uterus transplant (UTx), which may constitute a valuable alternative for such patients. Following decades of animal testing and clinical trials, several successful pregnancies have been carried to term. Yet UTx is still to be considered as an experimental procedure. The report's authors believe UTx has the potential to become a mainstream surgical practice, but for the time being, several ethical issues need to be weighed in before it does.

Validity and reliability of an instrument for assessing case analyses in bioengineering ethics education.

Assessment in ethics education faces a challenge. From the perspectives of teachers, students, and third-party evaluators like the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the National Institutes of Health, assessment of student performance is essential. Because of the complexity of ethical case analysis, however, it is difficult to formulate assessment criteria, and to recognize when students fulfill them. Improvement in students' moral reasoning skills can serve as the focus of assessment. In previous work, Rosa Lynn Pinkus and Claire Gloeckner developed a novel instrument for assessing moral reasoning skills in bioengineering ethics. In this paper, we compare that approach to existing assessment techniques, and evaluate its validity and reliability. We find that it is sensitive to knowledge gain and that independent coders agree on how to apply it.

The role of professional knowledge in case-based reasoning in practical ethics.

The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that case studies play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one's professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: (1) Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. (2) Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. (3) The non-research group--students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student's level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills.

Reengineering Biomedical Translational Research with Engineering Ethics.

It is widely accepted that translational research practitioners need to acquire special skills and knowledge that will enable them to anticipate, analyze, and manage a range of ethical issues. While there is a small but growing literature that addresses the ethics of translational research, there is a dearth of scholarship regarding how this might apply to engineers. In this paper we examine engineers as key translators and argue that they are well positioned to ask transformative ethical questions. Asking engineers to both broaden and deepen their consideration of ethics in their work, however, requires a shift in the way ethics is often portrayed and perceived in science and engineering communities. Rather than interpreting ethics as a roadblock to the success of translational research, we suggest that engineers should be encouraged to ask questions about the socio-ethical dimensions of their work. This requires expanding the conceptual framework of engineering beyond its traditional focus on "how" and "what" questions to also include "why" and "who" questions to facilitate the gathering of normative, socially-situated information. Empowering engineers to ask "why" and "who" questions should spur the development of technologies and practices that contribute to improving health outcomes.

Bioética: actitudes y valoraciones de la personas ante las inovaciones biogenéticas: estudio aplicado a estudiantes de nivel terciario de la carrera de psicopedagogía del Instituto de Enseñanza Superior Doctor Domingo Cabred de Córdoba: 2014 / Bioethics: attitudes and assessments of persons before the biogenetic innovations: study applied to tertiary students of the career of psychology Institute of Higher Education Cabred Doctor Domingo Cordoba: 2014

En este trabajo nos ocuparemos de la clonación y del conocimiento que de ella tiene un grupo social. Los nuevos desarrollos teóricos y prácticos producidos por la Biología, la Medicina, la Ingeniería, la Informática ha dado lugar a la aparición de interrogantes y realidades inesperadas hasta hace poco tiempo en el campo de la ciencia. Efecto de una invención social de fuerte crecimiento en los últimos tiempos, da origen a la Biotecnología, cuya presencia en el territorio del saber plantea inéditos desafíos a la misma cultura que le dio origen. En esa dirección, la Biogenética sorprendió a la sociedad de fines del Siglo XX con la aparición de la oveja Dolly. Tal aparición no se produce de manera azarosa o espontánea en el mundo de las ciencias, sino que inaugura la era de las técnicas de reproducción asexual para el humano. Tal repetición de lo mismo (no de lo igual) reconoce intereses remotos y lejanos en la historia de la humanidad, que se ha expresado de maneras muy diversas, con la búsqueda de la inmortalidad como horizonte. La precariedad en que nos sume nuestra condición de humanos mortales ha disparado desde antiguo ansias, fantasías, orientadas a la búsqueda de elementos que, por vía de lo divino, de lo fantaseado, lo anhelado o de lo que está más allá de lo humano (aunque esté hecho de la materia que la lengua humana produce), anuncien modos de prolongar o extender la vida más allá de sus límites biológicos temporales

Ethics of bioengineering organs and tissues.

Tissue-engineered medical products are now entering the clinical testing phase of development. Therefore, an open discussion is warranted regarding ethical issues that may arise as these novel 'combination' products move forward, such as when to conduct clinical trials, how to regulate such trials, when and how to responsibly introduce these strategies into clinical practice and how to maintain a positive public perception of the tissue-engineering field as a whole. These issues are discussed, and recommendations are provided for conducting first-in-human clinical studies.

"We now control our evolution": circumventing ethical and logical cul-de-sacs of an anticipated engineering revolution.

Philosophers, scientists, and other researchers have increasingly characterized humanity as having reached an epistemic and technical stage at which "we can control our own evolution." Moral­philosophical analysis of this outlook reveals some problems, beginning with the vagueness of "we." At least four glosses on "we" in the proposition "we, humanity, control our evolution" can be made: "we" is the bundle of all living humans, a leader guiding the combined species, each individual acting severally, or some mixture of these three involving a market interpretation of future evolutionary processes. While all of these glosses have difficulties under philosophical analysis, how we as a species handle our fate via technical developments is all-important. I propose our role herein should be understood as other than controllers of our evolution.

Conscience dilemma: to become a bioengineer or to survive as a biologist.

Bioengineering is the consideration of biological problems from modern engineering, therefore money-oriented, perspective. Today, grant-giving bodies always favor bioengineering projects rather than pure biology projects (like those in ecology, entomology, etc.). Therefore, today's biologist is forced to be on the horns of a dilemma. They have to either submit a very powerful and valid reason for the proposal of their project, or change the project to one having a potential of money-based outcome. On the other hand, because of dealing with the living components of nature, conducting a research in pure biology is like a kind of worship. For this reason, from a believer scientist's view, a deviation (in terms of research) from biology to bioengineering can be considered like committing a sin. Unfortunately, today's wild capitalism has been bringing new sinners day by day, and this system will continue for the foreseeable future unless grant-giving bodies comprehend the real importance of pure biology.

Harnessing our very life.

The Aristotelian ideas of nature (physis) and technology (techné) are taken as a starting point for understanding what it would mean for technology to be truly living. Heidegger's critique of the conflation of scientific and technological thinking in the current era is accepted as demonstrating that humanity does not have a deep enough appreciation of the nature of life to harness its essence safely. Could the vision of harnessing life be realized, which we strongly doubt, living technology would give selected humans transforming powers that could be expected to exacerbate, rather than solve, current global problems. The source of human purposefulness, and hence of both technology and ethics, is identified in nature's emergent capability to instantiate informational representations in material forms. Ethics that are properly grounded in an appreciation of intrinsic value, especially that of life, demand that proposals to give humanity the capabilities of living technology address the social, political, economic, and environmental problems inherent in its development and potential deployment. Before any development is embarked on, steps must be taken to avoid living technology, whatever the term eventually designates, becoming available for destructive or antisocial purposes such as those that might devastate humanity or irrevocably damage the natural world.

Tightening of ethical standards in bioengineering brings teaching the fore: in a realm noted for puzzlement, a rare consensus is achieved.

While the practice of ethical pondering has a formal academic history more than several thousand years old, and its pedigree within the human heart is undoubtedly much older, the somewhat specialized field of bioethics goes back approximately only 50 years in the United States. And while practitioners in the field-known as much for their painstaking pondering as for their acrimonious tendency to disagree-rarely achieve quick consensus on the pressing issues of the day, it would appear that in the United States we have reached some consensus on the best way of teaching biomedical ethics to undergraduate students.

Governing the moral economy: animal engineering, ethics and the liberal government of science.

The preferred Western model for science governance has come to involve attending to the perspectives of the public. In practice, however, this model has been criticised for failing to promote democracy along participatory lines. We argue that contemporary approaches to science policy making demonstrate less the failure of democracy and more the success of liberal modes of government in adapting to meet new governance challenges. Using a case study of recent UK policy debates on scientific work mixing human and animal biological material, we show first how a 'moral economy' is brought into being as a regulatory domain and second how this domain is governed to align cultural with scientific values. We suggest that it is through these practices that the state assures its aspirations for enhancing individual and collective prosperity through technological advance are met.