How could I teach students to be ethical? I focused on that question during the eleven summer days of CSEP's 1997 Ethics Across the Curriculum workshop. Returning to my university, I decided to integrate ethics throughout the semester in one of my classes.

Because my subject is biology, I chose a biology course, Structure and Function of the Cell. But whether you teach engineering or English, I hope the following entries from the diary I kept while I experimented with teaching ethics will spark ideas in you for incorporating ethics into your classes. I would like to know the results. My e-mail is nrobinso@flash.net.

Ethics Module 1, First Day of Class
I had two goals. The first was to introduce the concept of a code of ethics. I wanted the students to recognize that no matter what profession they entered, they would be expected to satisfy an ethical standard. I wanted them to appreciate that ethical behavior is an integral part of being a professional.

I began by asking students what interested them in biology and what their career goals were. Then I announced that although many of them were to become doctors, physical therapists, dentists, and so on, as long as they were in this class they would be treated as biologists-in-training and have to follow the biologists' (un-written) ethical code When they became members of other professions, they would be guided by other ethical codes. Thus I introduced the concept of codes of ethics.

My second goal was to prompt students to relate a behavior - adherence to lab safety - to an ethical code. Often, students do not take safety lectures seriously, preferring to assume risk for themselves. I wanted students to consider the risk to others--to see that lab safety was not an individual but a social (and ethical) issue. So, for example, when discussing the rule prohibiting food in the lab, I stressed the risk such food posed to the safety and health of coworkers. I stressed safety and health of coworkers as well in regards to chemical disposal and the use of hoods.

I believe that focusing on ethics in this way was more successful than a simple lab safety lecture. This semester, unlike previous semesters, I had no complaints about restriction of food or about other safety requirements and only had to remind students about the rules a few times. The students seemed to internalize the rules more successfully because they could assign a purpose to them larger than a teacher's preference.

Ethics Module 2, Week Five
My main goal was to discuss research ethics and the importance of giving credit to other researchers. It is not uncommon for scientists to have an opportunity to enhance their own career by not giving credit to other researchers. I wanted students to realize that according to the biologists' code of ethics, there is a firm standard of behavior: always give others the credit they are due. I wanted to present the students with different scenarios under which they might have to decide whether to give credit and how much credit is due. Discussing these scenarios, I wanted to teach them to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant factors when determining the proper course of action.

I started by telling a story that I heard at a dinner party about a meeting at a large oil company where management decided not to hire any students from a certain top research lab because the principal investigator was unethical. Management had made that decision because they did not feel they could trust students from a lab where proper behavior was not modeled. Bad ethics could translate into bad research or other behavior not to the benefit of the company. So, I told my students that I didn't want it said that Wesleyan trained unethical scientists and, therefore, we were going to discuss research ethics using three cases.

The first case was far removed from the students' own experience. The question concerned the Nobel Prize that Otto Hahn, a chemist, was awarded in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission. Should he have sought to share the prize with Lisa Meitner, a physicist, whose collaboration provided ideas essential to the discovery? I started with this case because students would not feel threatened or obliged to defend their own behavior. The case was a safe way to determine which facts were relevant when deciding when credit should be given.

The second case we discussed is a common scenario in research, involving giving credit on posters. (At many conferences, interesting research not important enough to present as a formal talk is presented as a poster--as at a science fair.) The students might well find themselves in this situation. However once again, the situation was removed from their present experience; therefore, this case was also not threatening.

Finally, we discussed a case regarding lab time in class. I allow students to work in groups but require each to do all the experiments and his or her own write-up. What if two overworked students agreed to divide up the experiments, each doing half and sharing the data with the other?

The students enjoyed this case. However, because they could relate to the story, they found themselves defending unethical behavior with such excuses as "we are only human." So I referred to the moral concepts that they had listed during discussion of the first two cases and asked them to apply those concepts to this new case. I had the students list factors that might in real life affect their decision (such as fatigue); then I asked them to list factors that should affect their decision (as detailed by them in the previous cases). I was able to integrate the ideas we had discussed in the two earlier cases with this case. We then discussed whether "being human" was an excuse for not behaving ethically. I am not sure if the discussion was convincing, though, or if many or even most students still feel that "being human" excuses all sorts of behavior.

In order to assess whether the students had absorbed the tools we had used to dissect these three cases, I gave them another case for homework with questions to answer. From the students' answers, I felt that most of them could, at least in the abstract, identify relevant factors and use them in making an ethical decision.

Ethics Module 3, Week Nine
I had two purposes during this session. First, I wanted to give the students more tools to use in ethical reasoning--for example, ways to analyze situations based on the "greatest good" (consequences) or on universal moral rules. Second, I wanted the students to appreciate the impact scientific knowledge is having on social and political decision-making. I wanted students to use scientific knowledge to answer a social question.

The social question we discussed was regulation of smoking; the scientific knowledge involved a carcinogen, a specific compound in cigarette smoke known to cause mutations in a gene that suppresses tumors. I asked my class:

Benzo(a)pyrene is a chemical in smoke that causes mutations in the tumor suppressor gene p53. Second-hand smoke can cause cancer. Does this biological reality--that benzo(a)pyrene causes mutations in p53--change the ethical debate in which individual freedom of choice must be balanced against the ethic of not doing harm to others?

I was careful to reiterate that I was not criticizing smokers in the class. However, this was one case in which we understood the biology of the cause and did not have to rely on correlations, which are weak evidence. I noted that the students would have to make political decisions based on their biological knowledge. We considered where the greatest good and harm would lie and also whether "personal freedom" was an "overriding force."

In general, the discussion went well. But some students, especially the smokers, wanted to discuss their personal solution--usually a compromise of some sort. They had trouble thinking about the question as a decision for society at large. They felt that, since they had a solution they were happy with, everyone else should let them be.

Conclusion
I was pleased with the results of my first foray into teaching professional ethics. The degree of ethical discussion seemed appropriate to the course, judging by my own observations and student surveys. I would have enjoyed incorporating more cases, perhaps about genetic disorders; however, time was too short.

In the future, I'd like to assess the impact of ethical instruction--to discover if any of the principles discussed actually affect students' behavior. Of course, such investigation would require a good assessment instrument and experimental design. My suspicion is that one class will not significantly affect students' behavior; but I hope that if ethical principles are integrated throughout many classes, students will be influenced to act more ethically.