Bioengineering ELSI

This report is a summary of one I presented to the committee tasked with identifying the future of bioengineering and by extension the UW BioE department. It has been revised for consideration by the Bioengineering Department's chair search committee. My opinions are based in large part on my experiences leading a group on campus called the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy.

I think it is important for the bioengineering department – and by extension the chair – to seek innovative ways to bridge science and engineering with medicine, ethics and social impact. From my perspective, the extent that this is even considered as an important task by the bioengineering department is small. In the current environment of ultra-competitive funding (Science, Vol 316, 20 April 2007, p. 356-361), increased occurrences of scientific misconduct (Nature, Vol 435, 9 June 2005, p.737-8), and ever-prevalent social concerns about science, I believe it important for the chair to have ideas about how to prepare students for the complexities of biomedical research and enable faculty to engage each other in meaningful conversations.

Several research strengths at the UW exist in the midst of important public discussions about science and society. Three of these are global health, stem cell research, and nanotechnology. Not only are there prominent researchers in each of these fields within or affiliated with the bioengineering department, but there are centers here focused on each of these topics. As the bridge between basic biomedical research and practical implementation, bioengineers are uniquely positioned to think critically about the needs and expenses of the technology they are building. I believe that the best bioengineers will be able to integrate needs and opinions from society into the healthcare setting. They should be, at the minimum, competent communicators about issues in science, engineering and society.

I believe strongly that a deliberate effort to incorporate issues of social responsibility and public policy into science and technology would provide the foundations to develop individuals that will lead their fields in academia, the corporate sector and the public sphere. How would this be accomplished? I have some ideas, but there are several more out there. Candidates for chair should provide innovative insights into how meaningful conversations about ethical, legal and social implications of research could be facilitated in the UW Bioengineering department. It will not be easy to incorporate concepts often relegated to liberal arts departments into a technical education, but creativity and dedication could result in significant gain. Bioengineers familiar with the global, social and political context of their work will be better prepared to tackle the current challenges in health care and lead us through the next century.

Would You Like Peanut Butter With your Spinach?

I recall my mom preparing lightly steamed spinach salad cooked with a small dollop of chunky peanut butter. I find it ironic that the two most recent reports of food-borne illness refer to ingredients from the same fond culinary memory.

But seriously, what's the deal with these outbreaks?

How is it that a peanut plant in Georgia causes illness in Washington state, spinach from California gets recalled in Massachusetts and the lucrative carrot juice market takes a hit everywhere?

A Centers for Disease Control spokesman (Robert Tauxe, chief of the CDC's Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch) recently said, "Nature's been throwing us curve balls. We've had seven major product outbreaks in the last five months, and three have been in brand-new foods — botulism in carrot juice, E. coli in spinach, and now this."

Excuse me: NATURE's been throwing us curve balls?

Each of these contaminations were in food processed at large manufacturing centers or distribution points. Perhaps if we relied less on the global industrial complex for our food and more on in-season produce and local meat, we really would be more healthy! You won't catch me in the aisles of Whole Foods quite yet, though. I have to make more than a graduate student's salary to be found there doing anything more than collecting some delicious free samples on the way to work.

In case any of you have Peter Pan or Wal-Mart 'Great Value' brand peanut butter with the numbers 2111 on the lid, you can avoid an interaction with the CDC's Diarrheal Diseases Branch by throwing that container away. If you need other reasons to avoid Wal-Mart, I could connect you with more resources on that front.

This Just in From Kansas...

Did you think that the new school board elected last year in Kansas would solve the political dilemmas in that state about evolution and creation? If so, you should reconsider your ideas about the appropriateness of elected officers defining education standards. The political pendulum will always swing, but the recent pass has opened a new can of worms. This time, defenders of evolution must deal with topics that has plagued this debate for a century: the problems of eugenics and social Darwinism.

First, a brief timeline from Kansas:

August '99: Kansas state school board de-emphasizes evolution in science standards.
August '00: Two conservative board members booted.
February '01: Evolution teaching restored.
August '02: Board split 5-5 on evolution.
August '04: Conservative resurgence led by Kathy Martin: Creationism 6, Evolution 4
February '05: Announcement that evolution will be reconsidered.
November '05: Science standards criticizing evolution approved.
August '06: Pro-evolution members regain majority.
February '07: Standards including evolution adopted.

So what's the fuss about?

Well, it turns out that not only is the new school board removing the creationist and intelligent design (ID) material from the science standards, they are removing references to the two most egregious examples of scientific misconduct from the twentieth century. It happens that in November 2005, the standards that inserted ID in the science curriculum, also for the first time included accounts of the Tuskegee syphilis study and Nazi human experimentation. My guess is that these were thrown in as tools to discount everyday science as immoral. In fact, it is the pseudoscience of eugenics that should be criticized! Now ID proponents, including Seattle's Discovery Institute, are using this example of 'censorship' to point out that science education is being improperly sanitized.

So I guess we need to talk about what students actually learn about science in school... Every science student is introduced to the scientific method, but most scientists (and every philosopher of science) who read a high school textbook will agree that the accounts of the history of science are sanitized. It's not really until upper level college courses that budding young experimentalists learn that science is not exactly tidy. Experiments rarely work the way you think they will, and the discoveries that are so succinctly accounted in the textbooks were preceded by years of failure. That does not even touch on the fact that ethics and the responsible conduct of science are hardly ever taught on through the graduate levels. So is it a step in the right direction to include these crimes of human experimentation at the high school level?

I have to agree with these ID proponents that introducing students to horrors conducted in the name of science is acceptable. The examples of Nazi science and Tuskegee belong in science education within the context of learning about the practice of science. A condition of including these accounts should be a proper discussion of the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report as efforts to reach consensus on the limits of scientific experimentation.

As a final side note, I have yet to see an account accessible to the public that distinguishes evolutionary biology from social Darwinism and eugenics. Does anyone know of one?

Bioengineering in Society

This is the short version of a vision I have for the UW bioengineering department's strategic plan. I've posted the longer version in a comment.

Bioengineering is a term that includes many particular topics, but it is always associated with advances in medicine or biotechnology. Since its inception, the field has been synthetic. In the 1960’s, physicians and materials scientists collaborated to generate a solution enabling long-term kidney dialysis. The Teflon Scribner shunt led to Seattle’s prominence as renal failure treatment center and is but one example of ground-breaking interdisciplinary engineering work at the UW. Bioengineers may forget that it also set the stage for a situation in which a “God Committee” made decisions about which patients could receive the expensive dialysis procedure in a resource limited environment. In the end, federal health care policy was changed so that no renal failure patient would be refused treatment. The area of bioengineering that I believe should be tackled in the next 5-25 years is not a specific research program; it is the way that bioengineers think about their position in society.

As the bridge between basic biomedical research and practical implementation, bioengineers are uniquely positioned to think critically about the needs and expenses of the technology they are building. I believe that the best bioengineers will be able to integrate needs and opinions from society into the healthcare setting. They will be at the minimum competent communicators about issues in science, engineering and society.

My proposal is for the bioengineering department to deliberately invest in the dialogue among bioengineers about the social implications of the work they do. Several research strengths at the UW exist in the midst of important public discussions about science and society. Three of these are global health, stem cell research, and nanotechnology. Not only are there prominent researchers in each of these fields within or affiliated with the bioengineering department, but there are centers here focused on each of these topics. It is clear that faculty and students are committed to contributing to society in meaningful ways. The Grand Challenges in Global Health Care grant is an example that bioengineers at the UW are committed to the complex challenge of moving healthcare out of the resource intensive Western hospital environment into the home and beyond to developing countries.

I believe strongly that a deliberate effort to incorporate issues of social responsibility and public policy into science and technology would provide the foundations to develop individuals that will lead their fields in academia, the corporate sector and the public sphere. How would this be accomplished? I can imagine three techniques. The first is a prominent seminar series on campus focused on issues in engineering and society. Speakers must be qualified to discuss the social and political aspects of fields that they work with, not merely offer armchair analyses of public policy. Such a series could rotate between bioengineering related fields of global health nanotechnology, or stem cell science. Another technique – perhaps more effective but less prominent – at increasing knowledge and ideas about science and society is an ongoing discussion group that includes faculty and all levels of trainee. This could incorporate idealism, practicality and a breadth of ideas in a collegial environment that could engage student and teacher alike. The third, and perhaps most difficult implement would be a course focused on issues of engineering and society. Challenges here include finding the teaching resources, adding to an already heavy course load, and the artificiality of classroom discussion on social, ethical and political issues. Perhaps this would be best as a joint effort between departments. It will not be easy to incorporate concepts often relegated to liberal arts departments into a technical education, but creativity and dedication could result in significant gain. Bioengineers familiar with the global, social and political context of their work will be better prepared to tackle the current challenges in health care and lead us through the next century.

Here are some web resources for UW groups interested in science and society:

International Health Group:
http://depts.washington.edu/ihg/index.htm
Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Student Association:
http://students.washington.edu/nansa/index.html
Forum on Science Ethics and Policy:
http://www.fosep.org/