Several hefty, ethical arguments figure in this issue.
 
We, the public, seldom glimpse the world behind medical research. All the more reason to savour the SPATalk, which asks whether regulation of clinical research is damaging public health. From the researcher’s point of view, Charles Warlow’s frustration with jungles of rules and regulations is palpable. His protests spring from experience (sending ‘5789 pages of A4 weighing 26.9 kg to 15 local research ethics committees, all for three trivial amendments, which delayed the research project by months’); he argues that ‘the bureaucratic juggernaut of research ethics committees’ needs sorting.  His sparring partner, John Lilleyman, agrees that there are difficulties, but reassures him that everyone involved is showing ‘an emerging will’ to find solutions. He points to improvements, and urges Warlow to hang on in there.

No less passion pours from the page in the discussion of hybrid embryos. Martin Bobrow explains that they could fill the gap in supply of human embryonic stem cells needed for research into disease modelling, drug discovery or individualised stem cell therapy. He sees no ethical problems with creating a specific type of hybrid embryo involving human nuclei and cow or rabbit eggs. David King, on the other hand, rails against a scientific establishment which, he says, is incapable of understanding the public’s concerns. Ordinary people, he argues, see different species as qualitatively different, and are revolted by mixing them. He forecasts a public backlash against the research.

Stem cell research is one of the areas the Government Chief Scientific Adviser cites to show the need for a code of ethics for scientists themselves. Nigel Praities surveys the arguments for and against the government’s code. On the one hand, it is welcomed as a tool for ensuring ‘that scientists are reminded of their legal and ethical responsibilities’. On the other, it is dismissed as a paper tiger, which assumes that scientists misbehave because they are naughty rather than because research is increasingly being driven by commercial pressures. 

We worry about the value of science for society. But Sheila Jasanoff would rather cast our expectations of science differently. What, she suggests, if we were to ask how effectively the values of society are being incorporated into the products of science and technology? In a five-point primer to a wider debate, she urges us to dissect the assumptions behind familiar phases such as ‘the public’ and ‘evidence¬based policy’. In this and other ways, she writes, we can come to use science and technology as ‘instruments through which we realize the most enduring aspirations of our societies’. 

Science students are already thinking along these lines. Vanessa Spedding argues that they are just as interested in the ‘why’ as the ‘how’ of science.  Surveys show they want more emphasis on the moral and ethical implications of the science they study in the classroom, and that many choose careers with environmental and social goals in mind.  Tapping into these concerns would, she believes, attract more students to science.

Tracey Brown is worried about our propensity to let the ends justify the means. Where the subtleties of evidence get in the way of the aims of policy, she writes, we are invited to overstate the evidence because ‘surely, we approve of the outcome?’ With contentious stories of children overeating, warnings about passive smoking, recycling targets that take no account of energy use and questionable dossiers on WMD, insisting on the evidence is often dismissed as scientific pedantry. She argues that truth has an absolute right to be heard and understood as such, even at the cost of social peace.