Public Participation in Science

Public Participation in Science
Author: Simon Joss
Publisher: NMSI Trading Ltd
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1995
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780901805850

The call for increased public involvement in the formulation of science and technology policy has resulted in the consensus conference: an initiative which involves lay people in the assessment of socially sensitive topics. This book draws together the pioneering experiences of the Danish, Dutch and British organisers of consensus conferences, as well as offering a scheme, developed at a multinational two-day workshop in 1995 in London, for producing comparable data for the evaluation of consensus conferences.

Bending Science

Bending Science
Author: Thomas O. McGarity
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674047141

What do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products? As this disturbing book shows, ideological or economic attacks on research are part of an extensive pattern of abuse. Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics political and corporate advocates use to discredit or suppress research on potential human health hazards. Scientists can find their research blocked, or find themselves threatened with financial ruin. Corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, even government agencies have been caught suppressing or distorting research on the safety of chemical products. With alarming stories drawn from the public record, McGarity and Wagner describe how advocates attempt to bend science or “spin” findings. They reveal an immense range of tools available to shrewd partisans determined to manipulate research. Bending Science exposes an astonishing pattern of corruption and makes a compelling case for reforms to safeguard both the integrity of science and the public health.

Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists

Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists
Author: Howard Winet
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2021-12-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 100048811X

This book introduces bioengineers and students who must generate and/or report scientific data to the ethical challenges they will face in preserving the integrity of their data. It provides the perspective of reaching ethical decisions via pathways that treat data as clients, to whom bioengineering scientists owe a responsibility that is an existential component of their professional identity. The initial chapters lay a historical, biological and philosophical foundation for ethics as a human activity, and data as a foundation of science. The middle chapters explore ethical challenges in lay, engineering, medical and bioengineering scientist settings. These chapters focus on micro-ethics, individual behavior, and cases that showcase the consequences of violating data integrity. Macro-ethics, policy, is dealt with in the Enrichment sections at the end of the chapters, with essay problems and subjects for debates (in a classroom setting). The book can be used for individual study, using links in the Enrichment sections to access cases and media presentations, like PBS’ "Ethics in America". The final chapters explore the impact of bioengineering science ethics on patients, via medical product development, its regulation by the FDA, and the contribution of data integrity violation to product failure. The book was developed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in bioengineering. It also contains much needed material that researchers and academics would find valuable (e.g., FDA survey, and lab animal research justification). Introduces an approach to ethical decision making based on treating data as clients Compares the ethics of three professions; engineering, medicine and bioengineering Provides five moral theories to choose from for evaluating ethical decisions, and includes a procedure for applying them to moral analysis, and application of the procedure to example cases. Examines core concepts, like autonomy, confidentiality, conflict of interest and justice Explains the process of developing a medical product under FDA regulation Explores the role of lawyers and the judiciary in product development, including intellectual property protection Examines a range of ethical cases, from the historical Tuskegee autonomy case to the modern CRISPR-Cas9 patent case. Howard Winet, PhD is an Adjunct Professor recall, Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering at University of California, Los Angeles.

Cutting Green Tape

Cutting Green Tape
Author: Richard L. Stroup
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 358
Release:
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781412821186

Hundreds of hazardous waste sites are on the Superfund National Priority List in the United States, and thousands more could become eligible. The Superfund has spent or ordered the spending of billions of dollars, with little apparent impact on human health risks. While public perception of the real or imagined hazardous nature of consumer and industrial substances has resulted in widespread attention to the issue, lawsuits have proliferated with liability aimed at "deep pockets" instead of individual agents who may be responsible. Contributors to Cutting Green Tape carefully examine the existence and severity of the toxic harms and liability problem, the erosion of a clear tort legal system to settle disputes, and whether a clearly defined system of property rights could be developed to reduce the dangers from toxic substances. Cutting Green Tape rethinks the nature and impact of today's environmental bureaucracy. Rather than continue unworkable, cumbersome, and often contradictory regulations, Cutting Green Tape prescribes a clearer tort legal system to settle disputes and demonstrates that clearly defined environmental property rights would reduce the threat of toxic substances. Among the many topics addressed are: air toxins policy; pollution, damages, and tort law; risk assessment, insurance, and public information; protecting groundwater; regulation of carcinogens; contracting for health and safety; and toxin torts by government. The book converges on a central theme: when common law remedies, with their burden of proof and standards of evidence, are replaced by the legislatively mandated regulatory regimes described, a problem emerges. The bureaucratic "tunnel vision" described by Justice Stephen Breyer, tends to take over. The police powers of the state are given to bureaucratic decision makers who are limited only by the blunt instrument of political influence, rather than by the need to show harm or wrongdoing in an unbiased court (as the police are), or by a budget on expenditures set by the Congress (as most bureaus are). The excesses described in the chapters thus result not from incompetence in the bureaus, but from the expansive powers granted to decision makers who are tightly focused on the narrow mission they see before them.

Science As Power

Science As Power
Author: Stanley Aronowitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 402
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452900108

Science has established itself as not merely the dominant but the only legitimate form of human knowledge. By tying its truth claims to methodology, science has claimed independence from the influence of social and historical conditions. Here, Aronowitz asserts that the norms of science are by no means self-evident and that science is best seen as a socially constructed discourse that legitimates its power by presenting itself as truth.