• Question: When You Experiment Do you think about ethical Conduct

    Asked by limey5298 to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jenni Tilley

      Jenni Tilley answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Yes, all the time because I use human and animal samples.

      All of my animal samples come from a local abbatoir and are taken, post-slaughter, from animals that were reared for food. The animals are humanely slaughtered (a vet has to be present when it happens to make sure it is humane), and I never work on animal samples before the animals have been killed. Generally I only use the bits that are not fit for human consumption (such as cows feet) but sometimes I can eat some of it – when I use sheep shoulders, I remove the tendon I’m interested in and the stick the rest of the meat on the BBQ!

      All of my human samples come from fully consenting adults. In order to be allowed to take the samples I have to be given approval by an ethics panel – they look at my planned experiments and judge whether my experiments are for the human good etc.

    • Photo: Mark Burnley

      Mark Burnley answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Yes, we have to declare that our experiments received independent ethical approval before doing any experiments. This can be a very time consuming process but absolutely necessary. Ethical conduct can reveal itself in ways you might not expect. I do a lot of experiments that cause the participants to exercise to exhaustion, and one key question is how much testing do I need to do to answer the “research question”? Too few participants, and I exhausted them without finding a valid answer, too many, and a lot of them did not need to be exhausted. Some of my studies will reveal statistically meaningful answers with 8-10 participants. So testing only 2 would be unethical, but so would testing 500, because that would exhaust 490 more people than necessary to answer the question!

    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I have to have thought about all the ethical issues in my research: like whether any of the questions I am going to ask people might upset them, or whether I have to decieve or trick people in order to do my experiment (we don’t always tell people exactly what the experiment is for, in case they don’t give us honest answers).

      I write all this down in an ethical proposal document, and a big ethics review committee at a University will review it and hopefully approve it. I can’t even begin my experiments until I have this approval.

    • Photo: Stuart Mourton

      Stuart Mourton answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Yes, every experiment i do has to be passed by an ethics commitee who will check my entire protocol to make sure it is suitable and wont injury or harm my subjects.

Comments