Delving into issues raised by the University of Wisconsin’s Go Big Read book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a group of researchers, faculty and staff members answered the research-related queries of a crowd of more than 40 people Thursday night.
Audience members supplied the questions for the panel via notecards, which included specific questions on what rights researchers have to their discoveries and broad questions about the benefit of research to society.
Various ethical issues have arisen throughout the history of research, panel moderator and associate dean of research compliance in the graduate school Bill Mellon said, with rules rarely being broken intentionally.
Provost Paul DeLuca said the research world is changing so rapidly it is difficult to simply keep up, and moral issues arise with nearly everything done in science.
As one of the largest research universities in the United States, UW conducts a broad spectrum of research, from performing experiments on mice and non-human primates, to conducting clinical trials on humans, Director of the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board Nichelle Cobb and Director of the Research Animal Resources Center Eric Sandgren said.
Amid the recent controversies involving UW’s animal research, Sandgren said RARC does not have a specific outreach program to educate the public, but specific trainers visit local high schools occasionally. On campus, Sandgren said RARC holds ethics training sessions.
Associate dean in the School of Medicine and Public Health Richard Moss said animals are used in research before humans in cases where researchers need to control the experiment.
In his research specifically examining genetic mutations in a human would prove too complex because so many things could factor into why humans have cardio myopathies, such as race, physical fitness and genetic history among others.
“Our mouse work provides us with a controlled platform for experimentation that is simply not possible with humans,” Moss said.
The number of animals used in research continues to rise, Sandgren said because of the necessity in experimentation, similar to what Moss explained.
The number is rising also because more and more research is being conducted on campus from many disciplines, Sandgren said.
“One of the great things about this campus is that there is research pushing forward at a lot of fronts all the time,” Sandgren said. “Those studies then are at a stage where they need animals.”
In the tradition of the Wisconsin Idea, researchers do not just use taxpayer resources or human subjects without giving back to the community, associate dean in the College of Letters and Science Susan Ellis Weismer said.
As a professor of communicative disorders who conducts research on autism, Weismer said she has students who work to gain the trust of the subjects they hope to study, with one researcher committing to help at an after school program for a year before ever conducting research.
When it comes down to it, though, the research done at UW benefits society no matter where on campus it comes from, Sandgren said.
“Some research has absolutely no practical benefits to humans or animals, except that we learn something about the world – maybe with the Hubble Telescope we learn something about the universe,” Sandgren said. “To me, things like that are especially valuable.”
