'Science's Dark Altar'
by Will Caverly
“Choice and Fate,” by Katherine Fraser, 2008, oil on canvas, 40” x 40”
EXCERPT //
The room where the beheadings happened was dark, cold, and dry, like the inside of a refrigerator when you’ve closed the door. It smelled like bleach and blood. The device looked sleeker than the ones I’d seen in grisly paintings of the French Revolution. But the idea of the mouse guillotine was the same: quick, efficient dispatch. The researcher who used it swore the mice died faster and with less pain than using the CO2 asphyxiation chamber. I had to take her word for it.
The animals that went under the knife didn’t consent to be there. They were sacrificants, offered up on the altar of scientific discovery.
In my work, managing the ethics of research at several academic institutions, I’ve learned that science, like religion, demands sacrifice. Catholics eat Jesus’ sacrificial body every Sunday; Muslims fast from all food and water for the daylight hours of Ramadan as a self-sacrifice remembering those less fortunate; and Buddhists can spend a lifetime (or lifetimes) partaking in a vow of silence. Parallel to these religious acts of sacrifice, scientific progress demands time, money, and even sacrificial life to push the limits of human knowledge.
In an advanced society prizing discovery of new edges, we use ethics to determine how best to hone them. The question isn’t if we pursue advancement. That’s settled. The minority of people disagreeing with the if get put in the camp of the last Luddite, Ted Kaczynski, or thought of as quaint, like the Amish. A consensus of law, practice, and attitude agrees that the problems we face—understanding the human brain, treating human bodies, stewarding human-influenced environments—are too critical to ignore.
Rules exist to manage sacrifice for two types of organisms: humans and non-human vertebrates (I leave out the third because insects, plants, and other invertebrates get only modest protections). I’ve managed to craft a slice of my career out of understanding and managing the ethical processes we use in research on these groups, most of it in Philadelphia’s academic circles. My job has been, and is, finding the best way to administrate the sacrifices related to progress.
For humans participating in research, the question of ethics comes down to principles demanded in the wake of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which U.S. public health officials intentionally left hundreds of African-American men untreated for the infection in order to study its effects; the men were given placebo treatment, and were not informed about the hazards of their infections nor about the study design in advance. The ensuing government-sponsored ethical brief, the Belmont Report, describes how society should protect people in research. The report’s most important ethical consideration for researchers is how human beings participating in research need to know what they’re getting themselves into. This is called informed consent. Humans must understand the research (be informed) and they must agree to participate (consent). Researchers must also consider the question of justice, that is, spreading the benefits of research widely, and the question of beneficence, which means maximizing benefits and minimizing risks. Everything from the reading level of study documents to how people are recruited for studies is reviewed by people like me. //
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