It is a truth universally acknowledged that pharmaceutical companies and arms manufacturers are not exactly pillars of morality in our society. ‘Big Pharma’ is known to fearmonger the impact of diseases and sell life-saving drugs at exorbitant prices, while the latter profits purely off war and human casualties. It is also no secret that the backbones of these workforces are, naturally, scientists.
Long before they became the driving force of these controversial industries, these scientists were all necessarily fledgling STEM students. At university, STEM students are packed with facts and ‘transferable skills’ over the course of a few years, before being packaged and sent off into the world as employable graduates. It is an assembly line, designed to churn out mindless ‘science-doers’ rather than people who want to use their scientific knowledge and skills to contribute to the advancement of society.
Therein lies the problem; because universities operate like corporations, they pay no mind to whether their students have any moral agency or capacity to think critically for themselves. STEM is so irreversibly intertwined with ethics in today’s world that to provide knowledge on the former without the context of the latter is simply irresponsible. Helena, a third-year chemistry student says: “I don’t think the first time [STEM students] think about ethics should be after they’ve done something wrong.”
The need to implement ethics courses as part of STEM degrees cannot be stressed enough. At the University of Edinburgh, biology students get a single tutorial on the ethics behind eugenics, while engineers only get taught ethics for less than a month over the four to five years of their degree. Biologists are allowed to opt out of a number of experiments that use deceased animals as their dissection subjects if they have any contention with them. However, in backing their moral principles, they risk missing out on learning valuable practical skills, as no alternative experiments are offered. Meanwhile, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists do not engage in any talk of ethics at all during their degree.
Upon speaking to STEM students of varying disciplines at King’s Buildings campus, most expressed the wish to have ethics as parts of their degrees, wanting to do so in discussion-based formats rather than lectures.
It can be argued that it will not make a difference; students will go into these industries whether or not they were forced to go to a couple of tutorials on the ethics behind them. Nevertheless, the goal is to create scientists with foresight who are conscious of what impact the outcomes of their experiments might have on people.
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