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NanoEthics

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01.08.2008 | Original Paper

Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Nanotechnology Researchers

verfasst von: Robert McGinn

Erschienen in: NanoEthics | Ausgabe 2/2008

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Abstract

A study was conducted of nanotechnology (NT) researchers’ views about ethics in relation to their work. By means of a purpose-built questionnaire, made available on the Internet, the study probed NT researchers’ general attitudes toward and beliefs about ethics in relation to NT, as well as their views about specific NT-related ethical issues. The questionnaire attracted 1,037 respondents from 13 U.S. university-based NT research facilities. Responses to key questionnaire items are summarized and noteworthy findings presented. For most respondents, the ethical responsibilities of NT researchers are not limited to those related to safety and integrity in the laboratory. Most believe that NT researchers also have specific ethical responsibilities to the society in which their research is done and likely to be applied. NT appears to be one of the first areas of contemporary technoscientific activity in which a long-standing belief is being seriously challenged: the belief that society is solely responsible for what happens when a researcher’s work, viewed as neutral and merely enabling, is applied in a particular social context. Survey data reveal that most respondents strongly disagree with that paradigmatic belief. Finally, an index gauging NT researcher sensitivity to ethics and ethical issues related to NT was constructed. A substantial majority of respondents exhibited medium or high levels of sensitivity to ethics in relation to NT. Although most respondents view themselves as not particularly well informed about ethics in relation to NT, a substantial majority are aware of and receptive to ethical issues related to their work, and believe that these issues merit consideration by society and study by current and future NT practitioners.

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Many individuals contributed to this study. James Plummer and Yoshio Nishi introduced the author to the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility. Paul Rissman, John Shott, Mary Tang, and Michael Deal made many helpful suggestions for improving the survey questionnaire. Mary Tang also devised a number of scenarios for one questionnaire item. Suzanne Brainard and François Baneyx provided important feedback on an early draft version of the questionnaire. Sandip Tiwari, James Meindl, Carlton Osburn, Fred Terry, Mark Rodwell, Paul Rissman, Lynn Rathbun, Kirsty Mills, James Reynolds, Carolyn Broome, Taft Broome, Elizabeth Litzler, Dong Qin, Jean Toll, Elizabeth Keating, Angela Berenstein, Brian Thibeault, Tina Prestridge, Lisa Daub, James Griffin, and Kathryn Hollar helped resolve various survey implementation issues. Steve Barley provided feedback on a draft version of this essay. Susan Holmes offered advice on the statistical interpretation of some response data. Special acknowledgment is due to Rafael Pardo Avellaneda for extensive help with the study, including numerous valuable criticisms and suggestions during the questionnaire-design, data-analysis, and write-up phases. An anonymous reviewer provided valuable analysis of the data in Table 3. Support from NNIN made this study possible. Remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03519/nsf03519.html

Ibid.

NNIN facilities are located at the following universities: Cornell, Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, Georgia Tech, Washington, Penn State, U. C. Santa Barbara, Minnesota, Howard, New Mexico, Texas, and North Carolina State.

For the text of the questionnaire, see Appendix 1.

E-mail solicitation of a NNIN facility’s users took place only after approval was secured from the local university human subjects research board. To limit the survey to NNIN researchers, the questionnaire was password-protected. To ensure that responses were anonymous, at the author’s request representatives of the Web site on which the questionnaire was posted blocked access to the IP addresses of the computers on which respondents did the questionnaire.

In a presentation at NSF in Washington, D.C. on October 27, 2006, NNIN Director Sandip Tiwari stated that in the March 2005–June 2006 period there were “4200 users performing research” at NNIN sites. However, since existing users stop using NNIN facilities and newcomers start doing so over time, the total number of NNIN users typically varies from month to month. Therefore, since it was based on the dynamic figure of 4,200 users, the claimed 24.7% percent response rate is in reality a rough approximation.

The smallest number of respondents from any one site was 30, the largest 204. However, these numbers are minima: they reflect only the 915 respondents who indicated their respective site affiliations.

Questionnaire items are referenced below by letter and number. For example, “A8” refers to the eighth item in part A of the questionnaire.

The qualifier “significant” was used in item A1 because without it, a respondent could have answered in the affirmative even if believing that all ethical issues related to NT were trivial. The aim was to make affirmative responses—“somewhat” or “strongly” agree—meaningful by asking at the outset about belief that there are significant NT-related ethical issues.

Instead of “ethical issues related to nanotechnology,” the more succinct phrase “ethical issues in nanotechnology” could have been used. But use of the latter expression would have risked focusing respondents’ attention on ethical issues in NT research settings, thereby deflecting attention from possible ethical issues linked to downstream applications and uses of NT in society at large. The longer but more neutral phrase was chosen with the hope that it would prompt respondents to consider both types of ethical issues.

A strongly disagree response was recorded in the data file as a “1,” a somewhat disagree as a “2,” agree as much as disagree as a “3,” somewhat agree as a “4,” and strongly agree as a “5.” In questions with a Don’t Know option, that response was recorded as a “6.”

The correlation between the variables ‘degree of agreement that significant EIRNT exist’ and the ‘degree of importance [to the respondent] that EIRNT be considered’ is statistically significant. The value of Spearman’s rho for these two ordinal variables in this data set is.595, with p = .000.

Indeed, the correlation between the ‘existence’ and ‘interest’ ordinal variables is statistically significant: Spearman’s rho is .530 and p = .000. In general, the greater a respondent’s degree of agreement that significant EIRNT exist, the higher her/his level of interest in EIRNT. In fact, the average level of respondent interest in EIRNT increases monotonically across the five levels of agreement that significant EIRNT exist, from 2.28 for the lowest level (“strongly disagree”) to 4.24 for the highest (“strongly agree”).

There are statistically significant correlations here between the ‘importance of the E dimension of the NT field compared with the importance of its S dimension’ variable and both the ‘degree of agreement that significant EIRNT exist’ and ‘degree of interest in EIRNT’ variables. The value of Spearman’s rho is .476 for the former and .470 for the latter, p = .000 for both correlations. The correlation between the ‘importance of E compared with the importance of S’ and the ‘how important is it that EIRNT be considered’ variables is also statistically significant; in this instance Spearman’s rho is .574, p = .000.

Responses from completely unethical to completely ethical were recorded in the data set with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, while ethics is not relevant to [judging] the action responses were initially recorded as 6’s, later recoded as zeroes to avoid misleading statistical results.

In the case of the ‘without telling administrators beforehand’ scenario, this sum plummeted to 37.2%. However, some of this decline is probably due to the fact that the first two scenarios involved a researcher who planned to do something that s/he “realizes is a potentially hazardous procedure,” whereas the third involved a researcher who planned to do something that s/he “believes is a non-hazardous procedure.”

In evaluating how worrisome the 24% take no action’ level is, two aspects of this scenario should be taken into account: characterization of the shortcut as “relatively safe,” and reference to it as behavior that “clearly violates published laboratory procedures.”

For citizens of countries other than the U.S., the situation was precisely the opposite, for both the report to management and take no action options: they were disproportionately highly represented amongst those who chose the former option and disproportionately lowly represented among those who chose the latter option. What to make of these findings is unclear.

Are there noteworthy characteristics of the 4.4% who strongly agreed that the only ethical responsibility of a researcher at a NT lab is to follow lab rules? Of the 44 respondents involved, 38 indicated their citizenship. Of these, a disproportionately low percent were U.S. citizens (39.5%) and a disproportionately high percent (42.1%) were non-U.S. citizens. (Recall that 64.3% of the sample consist of U.S. citizens, while citizens of other countries comprise 28.9%.) However, the small number of cases involved here—38—implies that a claim attributing differences in option selection to respondent citizenship status would be suspect.

The correlation between the ‘most likely response to shortcutter in your lab’ nominal variable and the ‘degree of agreement that NT researchers are willing and able to self-regulate’ ordinal variable is statistically significant; p = .018.

Besides “take no action,” the only other response option to the “most likely lab reaction to a shortcutter” item whose electors disagreed with the “NT researchers are willing and able to regulate themselves” claim by more than a 2 to 1 ratio was “take own shortcuts.” It would seem that most respondents who chose the “take own shortcuts” option believe that the phenomenon of researchers responding to known shortcutting by taking their own shortcuts counts against the plausibility of effective self-regulation.

P = .000.

In “Risk, Precaution, and Laboratory Practice”.

In “Ethical Responsibility and NT Laboratory Safety Rules”.

The second is discussed in “Ethical Responsibility to “Alert””.

The correlation between the ‘how well informed about EIRNT do you believe yourself to be?’ variable and the ‘how willing are you to spend some time in the future learning about EIRNT?’ variable is statistically significant.

The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies: Opportunities and Uncertainties, RS Policy Document 19/04, July 2004, p. 87. See also http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk and http://www.raeng.org.uk.

Quite a bit and very much responses could be viewed as indications that these respondents believe that the issues raised in Part A of the questionnaire regarding NT were also apt to arise in other areas of contemporary technoscientific inquiry.

Cross-tabulation analysis of the data in Table 3 yielded the following: Pearson Chi-Square = 42.585, df = 10, and a p-value <10⁻³. Thus the null hypothesis of no association between the ‘# of ethics-education courses taken’ variable (V1) and the ‘strength of belief that study of ethical issues related to science and engineering should become a standard part of the education of future engineers and scientists’ variable (V2) can be rejected; indeed, V1 and V2 appear to be strongly associated. Further, ordinal regression (“proportional odds logistic regression”) analysis of the same data, carried out by an anonymous reviewer, showed that the response differences across the three groups are meaningful and that the five major response categories cannot legitimately be reduced to a smaller number by any melding of categories.

An example of a [1, 5] scale frequently used in the questionnaire is that in which the respondent is offered five responses: strongly disagree (1), somewhat disagree (2), agree as much as disagree (3), somewhat agree (4), and strongly agree (5). When, working online, a respondent checked a particular qualitative response to a specific questionnaire item, the number (from 1 to 5) corresponding to that response was automatically entered into the data file as that respondent’s response to that item.

Generally speaking, the [1, 6] scales used in the questionnaire are identical to the [1, 5] scales except that they offer an additional response option, usually Don’t Know, to which the number “6” was assigned. However, to avoid distortion in data analysis, 6’s were recoded as 0’s.

Three comments are in order about the range of this variable. First, for consistency, the values of the responses to item A14 were altered so that the more important the respondent believed it was that there be clear ethical guidelines for the conduct of NT research, the higher the number assigned to the response. (Under the wording of the original item, the reverse was the case.) Thus, the response neither desirable nor necessary was assigned a “1,” desirable but not necessary a “2,” and necessary a “3.” Second, for items with [1, 6] scales, i.e., items offering a Don’t Know option, all responses of “6” were changed to “0” in the revised data set to avoid producing higher sensitivity values when a respondent was actually giving a Don’t Know response. Third, if a respondent skipped any of the eight items, that item added a “0” when calculating the sensitivity value for that respondent. Hence, while, in principle, the range of values of the “sensitivity to nanoethics” variable is from 8—if the respondent gave eight answers to which the number “1” was assigned—to 38—if seven responses assigned the number “5” and one assigned the number “3” were given—in fact the range is [0, 38], since a respondent could have skipped all eight items.

For items A2, A3, A6g, A15c, and A15d, responses of 6, for Don’t Know, were assigned the number 0 in order to avoid distorting respondent sensitivity scores.

Moor J, Weckert J (2004) Nanoethics: assessing the nanoscale from an ethical point of view. In: Baird D, Nordmann A, Schummer J (eds) Discovering the nanoscale. IOS, Amsterdam, pp 301–310

Dupuy J -P (2007) Some pitfalls in the philosophical foundations of nanoethics. J Med Philos 32:237–261CrossRef

Khushf G (2004) The ethics of nanotechnology: vision and values for a new generation of science and engineering. In: Emerging technologies and ethical issues in engineering. National Academy of Engineering Press, Washington, D.C., pp 29–56

Mnyusiwalla A, Daar AS, Singer PA (2003) ‘Mind the gap’: science and ethics in nanotechnology. Nanotechnology 14:R9–R13CrossRef

Lederman LM 1999 The responsibility of the scientist. New York Times, p A15, July 24

Titel: Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Nanotechnology Researchers
verfasst von: Robert McGinn
Publikationsdatum: 01.08.2008
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: NanoEthics / Ausgabe 2/2008
Print ISSN: 1871-4757
Elektronische ISSN: 1871-4765
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-008-0040-0

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