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Most physicists never receive any formal education in ethics, even though they face ethical questions
throughout their working lives. "
 
believes that it is vital for ethics to be part of the
undergraduate curriculum.

Ethics at work?

To what extent should a formal education in ethics be part of the university physics curriculum? When this
question is raised in the physics community, the response is often that there is no significant problem with
fraud in physics, and hence that including ethics in the curriculum is unnecessary. Even raising the question
is viewed by some as a waste of time at best and insulting at worst. I would argue, however, that such a
response takes an overly narrow view of the role of ethics in physics.

"Ethics" refers to the standards of conduct associated with our actions as professional physicists. Our
professional activities extend beyond traditional research to include a wide range of other activities that we
do in support of research, teaching and our interaction with the rest of society. That we consider ethics to
apply to the full range of these activities is important to the health of the physics community.

The "cold fusion" affair provides an interesting example. When Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann
announced ten years ago this month that they had achieved fusion at room temperature in a table-top
experiment, their declaration was, by all accounts, premature. Although a full examination of all the
intricacies of the story would require a book (see, for example, Frank Close's 
    

 
), several simple observations can be made.

The fact that many others tried - and failed - to replicate the experiments of Pons and Fleischmann can be
viewed as evidence that the scientific community can effectively weed out erroneous results, and hence that
"the system" works. However, an enormous price was paid (in both time and money) to investigate these
results. Had Pons and Fleischmann delayed in going public, these resources could have been used in a more
productive manner. At the same time, it is important to recognize that they did not have the luxury of
making their decisions in a vacuum. They had potentially made a discovery that could have been incredibly
rich in patent rights, and their university was anxious to share the wealth.

There are many lessons that can be drawn from the cold-fusion affair. One is that real-world decisions are
made in a complex environment that makes ethical decisions more challenging to implement. Another is that
society can pay a steep price for ethical lapses of this sort.

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Ethics does not just apply to high-profile cases such as cold fusion. Many of us, in much less dramatic
settings, have had to face the fact that some research results we have disseminated are in some way
inaccurate. A calculation may have been performed incorrectly, an instrument may have been wrongly
calibrated, an important factor may not have been accounted for, or a simple typographical error may have
crept into a paper.

In many cases, these errors could reasonably be classified as acceptable (and, to some extent, expected)
mistakes that are made in the course of scientific exploration. However, it is important for us to always
è

question whether we have rushed our results into print prematurely. I expect all of us have read a paper
where this seems to have been the case.

But there are many other situations in physics where we confront decisions that have an ethical component.
For example, can we be sure that our data have been analysed and reported fairly? Does a particular
individual deserve co-authorship on a paper? Are the projections we made in our grant proposal realistic?
When we are asked by someone outside the scientific community for our expert opinion on a particular
topic, do we have enough expertise to provide it? Are we taking our share of the responsibility for ensuring
that society is getting adequate technical advice from the physics community? Are we providing guidance
and training to our students that is appropriate for the current job market?


  
 

One way of helping physicists to appreciate the role that ethics plays in their lives is to include it in the
undergraduate curriculum. At Eastern Michigan University in the US, we offer a seminar course in ethics for
our physics majors, who meet for one hour each week to discuss readings from a wide range of resources.
We begin by discussing the five basic principles of ethics that were described in 1993 by the philosopher
and ethicist David Resnik. According to him, one should

¬‘ not harm others needlessly (the non-malificence principle);

¬‘ promote the welfare of others (the beneficence principle);
¬‘ allow rational people the right to self-determination (the principle of autonomy);
¬‘ treat equals as equal (the formal principle of justice);
¬‘ distribute goods on the basis of need or merit (the material principle of justice).

These principles can be viewed as the foundation of scientific ethics. For instance, the principles of non-
malificence and beneficence presumably help guide our choice of research topics.

We then spend some time in the course discussing specific codes of ethics developed by various professional
organizations. Even the most basic and apparently obvious principles can open the door to complex
questions, particularly those involving conflicting standards. The rest of our course is devoted to studying
specific issues, historical incidents, or particular individuals, with an eye to understanding how physicists
have handled difficult decisions in the past.

For example, we look at Richard Feynman's presence on the committee that investigated why the space-
shuttle  

blew up in 1986, and examine his brief service on a textbook review committee for the
state of California (see Ethical examples). The ethical questions of these case-studies are then used as a
spring board for discussing the rights and responsibilities of physicists who are asked to provide the public
with technical advice.

Another topic for discussion is the role physicists have played in weapons-related research. Fortunately, a
huge amount of information is available on how physicists approached issues surrounding the development
of the first atomic bomb, the fusion bomb and anti-missile or "Star Wars" technology. We also explore a
wide range of ethical issues associated with the publishing process by examining the "instructions to
authors" found in journals, reading editorials on the information explosion, and studying publications that
contain glaring errors. Budgetary issues are another topic. These range from the very local, such as the
appropriate use of grant money, to the much bigger picture of how physicists attempt to influence elected
politicians to allocate more money to physics research. Projects such as the International Space Station (now
under construction) and the defunct Superconducting Super Collider provide well documented case-studies.

One aspect of a student's scientific training can be addressed particularly effectively in an ethics course.
Most lab work that students do at high school and in their early college years consists of experiments in
which they are guided step-by-step to verify laws that they have already seen presented elsewhere. This type
[

of work fosters a skewed view of research as nothing more than an attempt to verify the known. As a result,
data that are inconsistent with "the known" are often tossed out by the student without explanation.

While we try to teach students to report all of their data - unless they can be eliminated due to clear
equipment or human error - this requirement is often dismissed by the students as unnecessarily time-
consuming and too likely to distract from the "correct" results. But by examining case-studies, a course in
ethics gives us the chance to convince students that there is a reason why we should not summarily discard
data, namely that to do so is misleading and may actually result in treasure being pitched with the trash.

In my experience, many students who have completed the course maintain an ongoing interest in ethical
issues. For example, one former student went so far as to write a Masters thesis on how ethical issues could
be incorporated into the high-school physics curriculum. And with the drive in the US to incorporate written
assignments in all facets of the high-school curriculum, ethical issues in science are a natural topic for this
written component.

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The longer-term impact of our course on ethical issues in physics is more difficult to assess. Since it was
instigated in 1988 about 60 students have taken the course. I recently collaborated in a survey of over 100
physicists in the US (not an entirely random selection), which showed that while there is a significant core
of interest in ethics courses, there are at the same time significant barriers that must be overcome before
ethics can be fully integrated into the physics curriculum (see ?
 




 1998 ü 473).
Chief among these are the discomfort with offering physics credit for a non-technical course and the
difficulty of finding someone with the time and interest to develop and teach ethics. Despite the presence of
such barriers, I believe it is worthwhile to continue to press for the development of ethics courses. While the
physics community has survived up to now without most of its members receiving any formal education in
ethics, it is nevertheless useful to reconsider whether the status quo is in our long-term interests. After all, as
the issues we face become more complex, it becomes increasingly useful for us to consider some of these
complexities before we encounter them - and having a clear picture of some of the basic ethical tenets will
undoubtedly help.

The current situation is rather like being asked to analyse the motion of a block on an inclined plane before
being taught about Newton's second law of motion or the properties of friction. The analysis of the problem
is possible without the background information and practice, but this is surely not the most effective
approach in problem solving. One of the basic principles in academia is that we pass our knowledge on to
the next generation of learners. This allows them to expand the knowledge base, rather than having to learn
all of what we know by trial and error. Why not take the same approach with ethics?

 



Marshall Thomsen is a professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Eastern Michigan
University, USNorbert Vance