The Good Science Project

I was happy this week to announce a third series of Friday Forums, and indeed a third year of life for the Good Science Project. Our first Friday Forum, on October 25th, is on the future of animal experimentation. Like all our Forums, this one will be a discussion of something close and intimate to the life scientific. And like all our Forums we will be able to step back from our busy lives for a short hour, discussing a matter of great importance to our lives as scientists, and gaining new perspectives.

The subtitle for the ‘animals’ Forum was provided by my colleague in Central Biomedical Services, Dr Anna Napolitano, who has been so helpful in setting up the meeting, finding speakers and setting the agenda. The subtitle is ‘Looking back, looking forward’ and is an excellent pointer to how the discussion might go. For in our work to ensure animal experiments are efficient in their outcomes, controlled by agreed conventions, and tied to progress in biomedicine, no doubt we should have a sense both of the history of vivisection and its projected future.

Ethics in science is always a mixture of technical fact and moral principle. With the animal model, the sense of moving forward in ethical discussion is very reliant on technical and methodological advances. Such advances are characterised by the ‘3Rs’, namely ‘replacement, reduction and refinement’, and have as their champion a campaigning organisation that promotes the very ideas we will be exploring at our Friday Forum. It is a very good thing that Imperial College now has its own, excellent website devoted to the 3Rs.

Stepping back a little, I can see that our ‘animals’ Friday Forum is a good example of how I want the Good Science Project – now in its third year – to work. I want our meetings to be properly sensitive to the daily priorities and pressures of daily science, and the things we call ‘ordinary science’. In the last two years the Project has therefore promoted a great amount of such ‘ordinary’ talk. We’ve argued about: the way technicians are important to science; the way scientists sometimes feel they have to be politically active; the way the design of laboratories matters; the problems of moving country to do your science; how your priorities change, or do not change, as you get more experienced in research. At the same time I have wanted to mix in with these quotidian matters much broader and elusive concepts: what do we mean by progress in science? What are the risks in science moving away from ‘blue-skies’ research to the high-impact variety? Can the arts and the sciences find points of contact?

In a recent blog I started to discuss a theme close to the heart of the Good Science Project. I told how our Vice-Provost, Prof Mary Ryan, had described my project as ‘ethics’. This had prompted me to go away and get clear in my mind how good science, and ethical principles, might mesh. As I described in that blog, the Good Science Project’s interest in daily science didn’t seem to match well the demands of utilitarianism, or rule-based ethics, which are the two strands of ethical argument we are most familiar with, and which typically are seen as the moral grounding of science. Instead, I asserted, it is virtue, or Greek ethics, that seems the better fit.

Can I explain this further, by looking at the subject matter of our first Friday Forum, on animals? Can I be confident that, if the Good Science Project is an exploration of ethics at Imperial College, as Mary Ryan suggested, the main philosophical tradition we should use comes not from Kant (rule-based ethics), or the Victorians (utilitarianism), but instead from classical Athens, and the work of Plato and Aristotle?

At first sight it seems likely that the ethics of the animal model will depend entirely on rule-based ethics, and on utility. For the way we describe the ongoing relevance of the animal model is clear. The results obtained from animal experiments are highly beneficial to human health and understanding. This lines up with the utilitarian idea that an act is good if it increases the sum of human happiness. And Kantian ethics are central to our understanding of the animal model too. For legislation and regulation – ‘Home office rules’ – are the basic grounding of good practice.

No doubt at our Friday Forum discussion of animal models these strands of thought will be mentioned. But it is my strong hunch that, when we have finished our conversation , and leave the Sir Alexander Fleming Building for some well-deserved weekend rest, it will be the classical Greeks, and the moral philosophy of Aristotle, that in some quiet way will be echoing in our minds.

For Aristotle, and for the tradition of virtue ethics, the point of focus must be on daily life and on the steady practice of our skills. This is no mere ‘turning of the handle’. On the contrary, for the idea of virtue to take hold, the importance is in the way we constantly enhance our skills, share our knowledge with others, see how best we can do our job, and challenge ourselves to work well. Aristotle describes this vision of virtue at length in his Ethics but for a more contemporary, and highly celebrated account, you should turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s magisterial After Virtue, published in 1981. It’s a densely argued book, so you’ll need to take your time. It is said that MacIntyre tore up his first manuscript, and started again, after reading the highly influential text of philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Written by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, the book is famous for its elevation of the importance of ‘normal science’ and its suggestion that the heart of science is not its progress, but rather its daily practice. And Kuhn went so far as to suggest that if philosophers want to ‘understand’ science, it is laboratory life that matters, rather than simply its developing knowledge. In a sense then, MacIntryre’s subsequent promotion of virtue ethics owes a lot to new ideas then circulating about the life of science.

Let’s be precise. Where does virtue ethics get traction, when it comes to the animal experiment? Why might utility, and rules-based management of animals, be usefully supplemented by ideas dating back two and a half thousand years, to classical Athens?

When we gather in Room 121 SAFB, on January 25th, it is the attentiveness, and the craft knowledge, of our panellists that no doubt will be striking.  They will be triangulating ideas about physiology, biochemistry, and comparative evolution and anatomy. We will hear about animal husbandry and we will hear about veterinary science. We also will hear from our Imperial experts about the regulation of experiments, and the way the value of such experiments can be discussed in public. It is great that joining us is John Meredith, head of outreach and education at Understanding Animal Research. And no doubt our audience will listen, share experience, and ask important questions. This, quite precisely, is what is meant by ‘virtue ethics’: a community, learning together over time, sharing skills, and putting priority into what is in front of us now, rather than some imagined future. Take care of the present, Aristotle would have said, and the future will take care of itself.

Read New series of Friday Forums to discuss the scientific virtues in full

When Vice-Provost Mary Ryan said: ‘Yours is an ethics project’, I had to start thinking.

Two years ago I started The Good Science Project. My idea, as told to Mary, was simplicity itself: the research culture in which we flourish will be one where conversation and debate, on contextual issues as well as ‘scientific topics’, are nurtured. I would set up brief, in person, lunch-included, discussion meetings – the Friday Forums. Nothing much, but it would help. At this point Mary said to me ‘That sounds good, this is an ethics project’.

I went away and asked myself: is communication-within-an-institution, however thoughtful and illuminating, a matter of ‘ethics’? Is Mary right?

The history of the phrase ‘research culture’ gives us a clue why the topic might indeed be an ethical issue. For the previous word we used was ‘misconduct’. As I write in a previous blog, the ancestor to our interest in research culture is a concern about trust. At the start of the millennium a number of high-profile cases from across the world made journal editors in particular, and research centres in general, worry about cheating. To a large extent the concern at that time seemed to be trust in individuals. Are some scientists ‘bad apples’, and what should we do about them? The year 2000 was also the time when the House of Lords Science Select Committee produced their epochal Third Report ‘Science and Society’. The report began with statements about a ‘crisis of trust’ in science. No particular mention was made there of misconduct or research culture, but in highlighting the concept of dialogue between science and society, the idea that the internal workings of science has civic relevance was bound to gain ground.

Thus it was that a discourse grew about science ethics being as much about institutions as it is about individuals. In 2002 and 2003 influential MRC scientist Peter Lawrence wrote for Nature magazine well-received articles on publication norms and the nature of scientific esteem. A broad conception of the culture of research institutions was the force of Sir David King’s code of conduct Rigour, Respect and Responsibility in 2007. Perhaps of greatest significance was the Nuffield Council of Bioethics 2014 report The Culture of Scientific Research in the UK, chaired by Professor Ottoline Leyser (who subsequently went on to champion these issues when she became CEO of United Kingdom Research Innovation).

All of us know that ethics is about the difference between right and wrong, about how to separate benefit from harm, and about how to advance justice rather than injustice. But all this is very abstract-sounding. How do ideas like these get traction on a laboratory? If discussions about research culture classify as an ethics project, what precisely should we discuss? Why might people gathering to discuss perspectives on their work, at a lunchtime Friday Forum, be considered to be engaging in an ethics project?

Let’s do some homework. When it comes to serious descriptions of European ethical thought, three strands exist. At the risk of being dull, I will list them. Firstly, there is deontology, or rules-based ethics. Here you know right from wrong because of rules: religious rules; rules which seem self-evident (murder is wrong; dishonesty is wrong); and, famously, ‘the golden rule’: do unto others as you would wish others would do unto you’. The philosopher most associated with rules-based ethics is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In science we have plenty of rules: animals, health and safety, and any number of management, HR and policy requirements.

Secondly, there is utilitarianism. This is where you judge an action by its consequences. If, all things considered, the action makes the world a better, happier place, then that action is the right one. A corollary, and a slightly disturbing one, is that the action itself does not carry particular moral weight. For example, perhaps in some circumstances killing, or telling lies, is the right thing to do, because the consequences are seen as so important. Another way of putting this is ‘the ends justifies the means’. Utilitarianism is a 19th century movement especially associated with the social reformers Jeremy Bentham (1746-1832) and J.S.Mill (1806-1873).

In science we are well-practised in using rules-based ethics, and utilitarianism, as groundings for our work. As regards utilitarianism, the resources we put into science are justified because of the future benefits that will accrue to people. Consider our College strategy: it is called ‘Science For Humanity’.

Almost automatically we think of the values of scientific research as founded on rules and on utility. The rules we set ourselves, the truth of the scientific results that we produce, and the likely future value of our work, dominate the stories we tell about our work.

But, just to give us pause, accounts of what scientists value about their work seem not quite captured by concepts of future benefit, or adherence to rules. Scientists on the contrary prefer to describe their enjoyment in their craft skills, in their steady accumulation of knowledge, and in their sense of being in a community where trusted sharing of ideas is a norm. And when they discuss their concerns about the scientific life it is the distorting impact of intense competition, too hard a fight for grants, and fears about a secure future in science research, that gain mention. And the strong sense often is that these drivers, even if accepted as inevitable and manageable, are not considered as central to scientific practice. These are not the aspects of science that make scientists happy, and cause them to think they are making progress in their understanding. Instead they are a distracting burden from the main task, a tax. We can suggest then that there is more to the life scientific than rules and future benefit. And this is where the Good Science Project comes in, and where Mary’s words prompted its strategy.

For it turns out that a third and lesser-known branch of ethics is perhaps best placed for elaborating the actual lives of scientists – virtue ethics. This is a very ancient tributary of ethical thought, stemming from the classical Greeks. Here, it is character that forms the focus, especially as regards a person’s daily commitment to their work and to their growing skills. For example, to use an example from classical Greece, a ‘good’ farmer is one who understands seed and soil behaviour and knows what needs doing when. Getting good at all these things – the steady development of skills and knowledge, and with that the steady growth of reputation – is the ethical ground for this farmer. There is no emphasis on broader rules, or on consequences. In today’s language, you might say that it is the person’s ‘practice’, and the respect it gleans within their professional community, that matters.

For the Good Science Project, virtue ethics provides the best way of responding to Mary Ryan’s declaration, and indeed establishes the point that this is ‘an ethics project’. By finding ways to help scientists articulate those aspects of daily science that normally lie hidden from view – I mean the pleasures of the technical and intellectual challenges of daily science – we can claim to be followers of Socrates and Aristotle, the very founders of European ethics.

Read Ethics and The Good Science Project in full