Today's Research Ethics Symposium will highlight the most trying questions plaguing labs around the world.
"Fostering Integrity in Research" is being held today from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the auditorium at the Centennial Engineering Center.
William Gannon, who works in the Office of the Vice President for Research and coordinated the symposium, said President David Schmidly has increased UNM's focus on research integrity during his time at UNM.
"This is a real feather in Schmidly's hat," Gannon said. "He came to campus with this in mind, for UNM to really take a lead in fostering research ethics and integrity in science. I appreciate that effort on his part."
Opening lecturer Paul Katsafanas, from the Philosophy Department, said moral philosophy is important to UNM students because it is an issue everyone will come across regularly, if not on a daily basis.
"Going through life, you encounter a variety of claims about what you should and should not do," he said. "It asks both how there could be any such thing as claims about what we should do and what's valuable, and it attempts to provide us with a method for resolving these puzzles."ˇ
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Lecture topics include moral truth, humanism, and research integrity in practice and on paper for science and technology. "Ethics is very important for students in my lab," said Xinyu Zhao, who works in the Neurosciences Department.
Zhao will also lecture today about three ethics arguments within the field of stem-cell research: human embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning and the possible use of stem cells from skin cells.
"My role is to (lecture) on what are stem cells about," she said. "People either get very excited or very offended.ˇSo, what I want to do is give a very objective perspective, as a scientist, in terms of what stems can do, so I can present what the goal is when we conduct research and use stem cells."
Ethics does not stop at the question of what to research.ˇScientific integrity in how subjects and experiments are handled is a key component of the symposium dialogue, Zhao said.
"I try to educate people in my lab," she said. "I want to make sure that they understand that working with animals is a privilege we have as a scientist, not a right. We cannot treat animals with inhumane methods. We have to treat every being with respect."
A great concern in the field is integrity of the scientific method. Researchers are expected to uphold codes of conduct in their practice and recording of information, Gannon said.
"As a researcher, if you're not truthful in your reporting, that could be prosecuted as research misconduct," he said. "There's that law side of ethics, what they call 'the stick.' You know, the carrot and the stick. The carrot is really knowing that you do things right and that your own personal integrity and the results that you come up with are truthful."
Gannon said he and the speakers want to open a dialogue to prompt students, community members and policymakers to ask relevant questions about science and technologies that affect the world around them.
"You do try and hit some sort of truth or meaning that's based in reality," he said.
Research Ethics Symposium
Today, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
Centennial Engineering Center auditorium
