Seminars
| Seminar
on Ethics in Science : |
The
Indian National Science Academy and the Society for the scientific values (SSV)
jointly organized a seminar on Ethics in Science on 8th March,2003 at INSA premises.
This seminar was convened by Professor KL Chopra, President, SSV. Professor MS
Valiathan, President, INSA while inaugurating the seminar, underlined the ethical
concern which has taken a central place in global societies particularly after
the second world war due to ever increasing role of science and technology in
our lives. With rapid advances in life sciences, issues of medical, genetic and
ecological sciences are riddled with ethical problems which are of concern to
government departments, social organizations, NGOs, academies and learned societies.
Several Indian and International agencies such as WHO, UNESCO, ICSU, ICMR and
DBT have dealt with ethical issues in the pursuit of S&T in various documents.
However, the problems and concern of developing. societies have not been addressed
to in these documents. INSA has, therefore, taken an initiative to set up an inter-academy
committee of all Indian scientific academies to prepare a national document.
R
Natarajan |
| Professor
Chopra emphasized that because of the multi dimensional functional aspects of
Ethics, neither a universal definition nor a universal code of ethics can be formulated.
Being honest to oneself and accountable to others is as good a definition as possible.
This seminar was attended by a large number of distinguished scientists including
Professor R Natarajan, Professor PN Srivastava, Dr AR Verma, Dr PN Tiwari and
others. Professor R Natarajan, Chairman, AICTE spoke on professional ethics, values
and accountability of engineer as a professional as well as engineer as a teacher.
Many speakers stressed on co-authorship issues where supervisor and other seniors
include their names without contributing much, fake degrees and honors, questionable
claims by scientists, multiple publications, plagiarism, appointments at senior
position and a host of such issues were |
|
discussed at length. Dr Vasantha Muthuswamy (DDG, ICMR), scope on genomic research
and ensuing issues of accountability- genetic engineering, cloning, embryo and
stem cell research, GMOs, Gene therapy, Xenotransplantation has opened up a Pandora’s
box of ethical issues. The seminar dealt upon ways and means to check unethical
practices in science.
|
|
|
