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- Creators: Maienschein, Jane
Description
Corporations in biomedicine hold significant power and influence, in both political and personal spheres. The decisions these companies make about ethics are critically important, as they help determine what products are developed, how they are developed, how they are promoted, and potentially even how they are regulated. In the last fifteen years, for-profit private companies have been assembling bioethics committees to help resolve dilemmas that require informed deliberation about ethical, legal, scientific, and economic considerations. Private sector bioethics committees represent an important innovation in the governance of emerging technologies, with corporations taking a lead role in deciding what is ethically appropriate or problematic. And yet, we know very little about these committees, including their structures, memberships, mandates, authority, and impact. Drawing on an extensive literature review and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with executives, scientists and board members, this dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of the Ethics and Public Policy Board at SmithKline Beecham, the Ethics Advisory Board at Advanced Cell Technology, and the Bioethics Committee at Eli Lilly and offers insights about how ideas of bioethics and governance are currently imagined and enacted within corporations. The SmithKline Beecham board was the first private sector bioethics committee; its mandate was to explore, in a comprehensive and balanced analysis, the ethics of macro trends in science and technology. The Advanced Cell Technology board was created to be like a watchdog for the company, to prevent them from making major errors. The Eli Lilly board is different than the others in that it is made up mostly of internal employees and does research ethics consultations within the company. These private sector bioethics committees evaluate and construct new boundaries between their private interests and the public values they claim to promote. Findings from this dissertation show that criticisms of private sector bioethics that focus narrowly on financial conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency obscure analysis of the ideas about governance (about expertise, credibility and authority) that emerge from these structures and hamper serious debate about the possible impacts of moving ethical deliberation from the public to the private sector.
ContributorsBrian, Jennifer (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James B (Committee member) / Sarewitz, Daniel (Committee member) / Brown, Mark B. (Committee member) / Moreno, Jonathan D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In response to the recent publication and media coverage of several books that support educating boys and girls separately, more public schools in the United States are beginning to offer same-sex schooling options. Indeed, students may be more comfortable interacting solely with same-sex peers, as boys and girls often have difficulty in their interactions with each other; however, given that boys and girls often interact beyond the classroom, researchers must discover why boys and girls suffer difficult other-sex interactions and determine what can be done to improve them. We present two studies aimed at examining such processes. Both studies were conducted from a dynamical systems perspective that highlights the role of variability in dyadic social interactions to capture temporal changes in interpersonal coordination. The first focused on the utility of applying dynamics to the study of same- and mixed-sex interactions and examined the relation of the quality of those interactions to participants' perceptions of their interaction partners. The second study was an extension of the first, examining how dynamical dyadic coordination affected students' self-perceived abilities and beliefs in science, with the intention of examining social predictors of girls' and women's under-representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
ContributorsDiDonato, Matthew D (Author) / Martin, Carol L (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Committee member) / Hanish, Laura D. (Committee member) / Updegraff, Kimberly A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Despite the minor differences in the inclusiveness of the word, there is a general assumption among the scientific community that the 'pursuit of knowledge' is the most fundamental element in defining the word 'science'. However, a closer examination of how science is being conducted in modern-day South Korea reveals a value system starkly different from the value of knowledge. By analyzing the political discourse of the South Korean policymakers, mass media, and government documents, this study examines the definition of science in South Korea. The analysis revealed that the Korean science, informed by the cultural, historical, and societal contexts, is largely focused on the values of national economic prosperity, international competitiveness, and international reputation of the country, overshadowing other values like the pursuit of knowledge or even individual rights. The identification of the new value system in South Korean science deviating from the traditional definition of science implies that there must be other definitions of science that also deviates, and that even in the Western world, the definition of science may yield similar deviations upon closer examination. The compatibility of the South Korean brand of science to the international scientific community also implies that a categorical quality is encompassing these different contextual definitions of science.
ContributorsHyun, Byunghun (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In 2004, the South Korean geneticist Woo-Suk Hwang published what was widely regarded as the most important research result in biotechnology of the year. In the prestigious American journal Science, he claimed that he had succeeded in cloning a human blastocyst, an embryo in its early stages (Hwang et al. 2004). A year later, in a second Science article, he made the earth-shattering announcement that he had derived eleven embryonic stem cell lines using his cloning technique (Hwang et al. 2005). The international scientific community was stunned. American scientists publicly fretted that President George W. Bush‘s 2001 executive order limiting federal funding for stem-cell research in the United States had put American bioscience behind the Koreans‘ (Paarlberg 2005). These breakthroughs offered potential solutions to immune system rejection of transplanted organs and possible cures for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson‘s, Down‘s syndrome, and paralysis (Svenaeus 2007). However, within a year, Hwang was exposed as a fraud who had faked his results and pressured his female colleagues to donate eggs without informed consent. Despite protests against his methods from Korean religious and nongovernmental organizations, Hwang had used his prestige to ignore his ethical obligations. The Korean government, too, was slow to investigate Hwang and to subject his work to appropriate regulation.
ContributorsClay, Anne (Author) / Hurlbut, James (Thesis director) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Marchant, Gary (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is currently a worldwide medical procedure designed to give infertile men and women the ability to have children of their own. An IVF procedure takes place outside of a woman’s body, often in a laboratory setting. However, before scientists used the procedure on humans, they initially performed IVF on animals for selective breeding and agricultural purposes. After scientists realized that the procedure had potential to become a treatment option for infertility, they expanded their research subjects to include using the technique on humans. During the procedure’s initial development, scientists began to conduct numerous IVF trials on humans that often ended in early miscarriages. This thesis shows us the history of how some of the first attempts at IVF in humans using various options such as donated egg cells and cryopreserved embryos, often ended in early miscarriages. At that time, most members of the scientific community and general public responded to those trials by regarding them as insignificant. In 1998, the success rate of women under the age of 38 having children with the use of IVF was 22.1%. Over time, scientists began to acknowledge those published findings that detailed various “failed” human IVF experiments. Scientists learned to use them as a guide for what to do differently in future IVF experiments. Because of that, scientists have since developed more effective IVF methods which have ultimately improved the procedure’s success rate. In 2016, the success rate of IVF had increased to 39.6% for women. Therefore, what we might initially think of as a “failure” is in reality not a failure at all, but rather is a “purported failure” because we can use it as a stepping-stone towards an end goal. By looking at the history of IVF research, my thesis illustrates how some of the most important science comes from acknowledging the purported failures along with the triumphant successes.
ContributorsTuoti, Whitney (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Abboud, Carolina (Committee member) / Fitzpatrick, Susan (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05