Biomedical Research Ethics

Name: ______

Please place a check mark by those descriptions you feel are ethical decisions. If you feel the decision was not ethical, briefly write the reason below the question.

_____ You are a scientist working on a new type of needle that is less painful than normal hypodermic needles. You need to test out some people’s reactions to the new needles versus the old needles – by sticking them with both types of needles. In order to encourage people to participate in your study, you plan to pay them $50.

_____ You are the head of a lab that develops vaccines. You are working on a vaccine for a new virus that is affecting many people worldwide, meaning time is of the essence. The vaccine is working well in cells in the lab, so you decide to start testing it on a few human volunteers.

_____ You are a researcher who has been selected to review grants for funding. While reviewing a particular grant, you discover that another research group has obtained new data that pertains to your area of research. You reject the grant for funding and encourage your lab to perform the experiments to publish the results as soon as possible.

_____ One of the graduate students working in your lab has just obtained enough data to publish a paper. You decide that in addition to the student and yourself, all the other members of your lab should be listed as authors on the paper. After all, your graduate student presented the work at lab meeting and some of the other lab members contributed to the discussions about where to go with the project.

_____Your lab is performing mouse experiments. You realized recently that you are running out of funding and the cost of CO2 to euthanize the mice is very expensive. You decide to kill your mice by setting up traps in the cages and disposing the mice in the trash. This saves you hundreds of dollars per year, which you can then use for actual research.

_____A former student in you lab has done several rounds of experiments that have lead to publications. In going back over his lab notebook, you discover that some of the data is incorrect. You repeat the experiments and decide to report to the journal that your previous findings were incorrect.

______Jenny looks at the data she has obtained. The results seem much more impressive if she drops two of the data points. She figures no one will care since she has repeated the experiments numerous times and each time the same points are present. As long as she drops the numbers each time, she is being consistent in reporting her data.

_____ You have an undergraduate student working on a project with a graduate student in your lab. When the project is finished, and it is time to publish the results, you realize that the undergraduate has done more of the work that the graduate student. You decide to make the undergraduate the first author on the paper and the graduate student the second author, even though the graduate student has more seniority in the lab.