Ethical issues in graduate research  (Page 6/9)

Rashamon-type cases

• Rashamon is a Japanese movie about a killing and a sexual encounter. These events are inserted into three different narratives by the three different participants. The killing may be a murder or a suicide, depending on the story-teller. The sexual encounter may be a tryst or a rape, depending, again, on the narrative point of view.
• In this assignment, the class will recreate the Baltimore case from the standpoint of the different perspectives of the case's participants. Margaret O'Toole is the heroine-whistle-blower, false accuser, incompetent researcher, or trouble maker depending on who is telling the story. David Baltimore is a Nobel Prize winning biologist who is either exemplary of scientific virtue or an arrogant insider. John Dingell is a Congressional representative holding hearings into scientific integrity; he is either a McCarthy-type figure engaged in a witch hunt or a genuine crusader placing the public spotlight on an internally corrupt scientific community. Theresa Imanishi-Kari is either a ruthless investigator playing the publish or perish game or the innocent victim of the accusations of a disgruntled former subordinate.
• Your job is to argue sympathetically from within each of these participant perspective. Then as a class, we will see if we can construct an overarching narrative or story that reconciles these conflicting perspectives.

Kelves provides the most comprehensive reporting on this case. Sismondo and Whitbeck provide shorter sketches. These exercises are built out of materials from each and where there are conflicts the author has given priority to Kelves's comprehensive study. Readers should consult all three to get an idea of the range of different views.

The notion of a Rashamon case comes from looking at the Swift case delivered by the research ethics team from Oklahoma State University and from the reflections on this issue by Patricia Werhane in her book, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making (1999), Oxford University Press.

The belmont report

• The Belmont Report was written, in part, in response to the abuse of those involved in the Tuskegee study. It identifies three fundamental ethical principles, respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
• The report then uses these principles as a framework for making sense of concerns that arise in experiments involving human experiments: the informed consent of those participating in the experiment, assessing the risks and benefits associated with a given experiment, and outlining the ethical issues involved in selecting subjects to participate in experiments.
• The Belmont Report was also influence in setting up and structuring what have come to be known as Institutional Review Boards or IRBs. More information on IRBs can be found by reading Van Kloempken's short piece (accessed through the Open Seminar link above) and the Office of Research Integrity's "Introduction to the Responsible Conduct of Research" especially pages 35-47.
• In this section, you will view a quick summary of the report's principles and research ethics concerns. Then you will apply these concepts by role-playing as a member of an IRB hearing a research proposal.