Hastings Center Report
Preventing the Diffusion of Moral Responsibility in Big Team Science: Taking an Ecosystem Approach
Abstract: Long-standing frameworks for the ethics of biomedical research are being challenged on multiple fronts by seismic shifts in the way science is practiced. One such shift, which is the focus of “Filling the Network Gap in Research Ethics: Analyzing Ethical Issues at Scale in Big Team Science,” by Susan Wolf and colleagues in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, is the evolution of biomedical research toward very large scientific teams. The authors seek to fill a gap in research ethics frameworks that arises with the conduct of big team science, at the mesolevel of research networks. However, I suggest ways that their focus on the ethical issues of traditional science such as authorship and data sharing and their confining of the concept of big teams to multiple but similarly constituted groups at research labs or institutions limit the scope of ethical inquiry in ways that potentially diminish the future utility of their analysis.
