Profs give talk on experimental ethics

The United States Army conducts a behavior experiment by observing soldiers in a plane whose pilots feign a crash. The Army learns crucial and possibly life-saving information about how soldiers react to fear, but the participants are left traumatized by the dramatization. Is this ethical? Determining whether a given experiment is ethical remains a hotly debated and still undecided issue -- but Penn students and faculty members participated in a casual discussion about these issues over brownies Monday afternoon at an event sponsored by the Undergraduate Psychology Society. The "Ethics in Experimentation" roundtable discussion featured medical ethicist Paul Root Wolpe, a faculty member in Penn's Center for Bioethics and the Sociology Department, as well as Psychology Professor David Bersoff. The two professors began with a clear-cut example of the unethical, Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, who conducted gruesome experiments on concentration camp inmates during World War II. "Interestingly, it was very difficult for the Nuremberg prosecutors to prove that the Germans had done something that violated an ethical code," Wolpe said, explaining that experiments on prisoners were routine practice at the time. "It was done in America all the time," he added. In the hopes of addressing such wide-spread abuse, Nuremberg judges created an international precedent that put forth two basic rules by which experimenters must abide: subjects must consent to the experiment, and subjects must be aware of the risks and the alternatives involved with the experiment. These ethical considerations came too late for the victims of the well-known Tuskegee experiment, a U.S. government-sanctioned experiment which allowed curable syphilis to spread unchecked in black males in Georgia for the purpose of medical study. Most of the participants died. The experiment, which began in 1932 and continued for 40 years, is widely considered America's "most notorious abuse of medical experimentation," Wolpe noted. Bersoff began his address by pointing out that "nothing is worth the cost of a life," although he acknowledged that the majority of experiments operate under "cost-benefit" considerations. "A greater benefit can justify a great cost," he explained. In the Army experiment, for example, the experimenters learned how soldiers behaved in the face of death. "The Army did learn information that could be crucial on the front lines," Bersoff said. In the student discussion following the talk, however, several people questioned whether the end attained by such an experiment justifies the means. "What were the effects on those soldiers who thought they were going to die?" College sophomore Jordana Riklis asked. This question of where to draw the line is decided by institutional review boards, internal ethics-minded organizations which are required at any institution that receives government funding and are also common in private companies. But Bersoff stressed that these boards often fail to include an unbiased or balanced group of people, noting that he is "often the only psychologist on an IRB, even when we are reviewing a psychology experiment." Overall, however, a sense of optimism about the judgment calls being made in the scientific world pervaded the discussion. "We have really tried to learn from the pain and abuse of past experiments, and I think there has been a lot of improvement," Wolpe said. Members of the Undergraduate Psychology Society said they are hopeful that these roundtable discussions will increase awareness of ethics issues in experimentation. "We think today has been a great success," UPS Vice President and College senior Jason Marbutt said at the end of the talk. The group plans weekly student-faculty luncheons and other events related to psychology.