Professor Julian Savulescu, director of the centre of practical ethics at Oxford University: "To fail to do beneficial research is as harmful as doing harmful research," he says. The whole article is available here.
And oh, yeah -- and James Hughes of the IEET quips: "When I get enhanced I want to look like Julian. Oh, and be tenured at Oxford also."
2 comments:
Okay, I'm just glad Jay said what I was thinking. Or, something at least along the lines of what I was thinking. ;-)
Right. Back to breakfast, then.
While it's an aside and I have great respect for Professor Savulescu, I just want to note that I totally disagree with the notion that failing to do beneficial research is as harmful as doing harmful research. This all depends on the benefits that flow from conducting such research, which I often think are either overstated, or overestimated given the tremendous difficulties we have with translation.
In contrast, the harms of conducting unethical research tend to be exceedingly harmful (in a qualitative sense), as anyone paying attention to the history of unethical research in the 20th century knows.
JMO.
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