Series Editors’ Preface
Science ethics is an emerging field in which the ethical and policy dimensions of science are perceived to be and are treated with an importance and urgency commensurate with the significance of the science and the benefits that flow from it.
It is at last being recognised that ‘science doing good’ and ‘doing good science’ are not only equally important but mutually supportive and even necessary, and that ethics is fundamental to achieving both. In science, perhaps more than any other field, the public interest cannot be subordinated to the pursuit of corporate profit or personal prestige.
The purpose of this series is to explore the ways in which science ethics broadly conceived must constitute a constructive and reassuring thread in the process from discovery, through proof of principle and innovation, to products in the clinic and the marketplace; and to propose positive measures to ensure that the highest standards of moral awareness and ethical conduct go hand in hand with the best science and the most useful technology. In doing so we will be commissioning work from the brightest and the best in this new field, aiming to encourage new work and young scholars as well as to showcase and bring to the widest possible public the very best of thinking in this field. To this end we are particularly pleased that as well as publishing books in the traditional way all work in this series will also be published open access online through Creative Commons. This will ensure that not only will everything we publish reach the widest possible audience but also that access to all our work will literally be freely available in every sense.
Two big questions are coming to dominate early work in science ethics; they are ‘Who owns science?’ and ‘What is the good of science?’. The first phase of the work of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI), established at the University of Manchester (http://www.isei.manchester.ac.uk/) and working in collaboration with a new iSEI Wellcome Trust Programme in The Human Body: Its Scope, Limits and Future, is devoted to these questions. Alongside work on these very fundamental ethical questions must go more detailed analysis of how ethical principles designed to protect individuals and ensure that science works for and in harmony with the public interest can be translated into the national and international processes of law and regulation that govern science and innovation and without which anarchy would reign. The present book by Catherine Rhodes is therefore particularly welcome.
This, the first book in our new series, outlines regulatory needs at the international level for a key area of science governance – the applications and impacts of biotechnology. It provides core information on the thirty-seven international regulations that are currently applicable to biotechnology and highlights a key problem for effective governance efforts caused by their fragmentation. It ends by pointing to possible routes forward.
Other topics on our urgent agenda include:
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Global justice
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Public health
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Technological governance
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Intellectual property
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The scope, limits and future of humanity
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Chronic poverty
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Climate change
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Environment
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Human enhancement.
Finally, we hope that study of these important issues will prove both interesting and useful and we welcome both suggestions for further work and proposals for new book projects.
