NEW YORK, AUG. 4, 2001 (Zenit.org).- Can bioethicists be objective if they are on a company's payroll? And do they have any professional credentials?
These are among the questions surfacing in the media as companies and legislators debate over issues ranging from embryonic stem cell research to human cloning - debates about life-and-death matters that are frequently influenced by self-styled bioethicists. In the United States, President George W. Bush is now deciding whether to allow federal funding for stem cell research that destroys human embryos in the process.
In its July 30 issue, U.S. News & World Report magazine raised pointed questions about the objectivity of bioethicists.
It reported that Art Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, says the conflicts of interest that bioethicists find themselves in can be "managed." Yet the article went on to note that Caplan "funnels his consulting fees from companies like Pfizer, DuPont and Celera into his center and is amazed by his colleagues who think that bioethicists should do pro bono work for wealthy biomedical companies."
Stock options, too
Biotechnology firms are increasingly turning to bioethicists to serve on boards or as paid consultants. The job of the latter, in theory, is to weigh in objectively on the ethics and morality of companies' most controversial work. Whether objectivity is attainable is an open question.
"In recent years, the biomedical industry has given at least $2 million to bioethics centers and offered lucrative contracts to academic researchers to study ethical issues in the field," U.S. News stated. "In a few cases, firms have allegedly even offered bioethicists stock options. Consulting fees range from $200 per diems ... to contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars. Companies have long tempted scientists and physicians with sweet rewards. But for bioethicists, it's something new, and the potential risks cut to the profession's quick."
Paradoxically, doubts about secular bioethicists are rising just as their influence is growing. "They're quoted almost daily in the media, testify before Congress, and advise the president," the U.S. News article notes. "It's an odd development for a profession that has no formal education or licensing requirements."
The oddity has not been lost on ethicists themselves. R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin, told the New York Times in its Thursday edition, "Anybody can stand up and claim to be an ethicist - there is no licensing, there is no accreditation."
That does not reassure the critics of bioethicists. "The bioethicists have set themselves up, almost like Napoleon crowning himself emperor, as the arbiters of what is moral and ethical in health care," Wesley J. Smith, author of "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America" (Encounter Books), told the Times. "A hairdresser has to have a license."
That trend could start to change. This October, the world's first school of bioethics will open, in Rome, at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum (see ZENIT's archives). "Bioethics has become a genuine academic discipline, which calls for serious dedication to study and research," Father Paolo Scarafoni, rector of the athenaeum, told ZENIT in May.
Shopping around
For now, secular bioethicists sometimes appear in an awkward position, given their work for biotechnology companies.
"This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field," Dr. Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, a medical-ethics institute, acknowledged to the Times. "These companies are smart enough to know that there are a variety of views on these subjects, and with a little bit of asking or shopping around you can find a group that will be congenial to what you are doing."
One company whose ethics board has raised eyebrows is Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology concern in Worcester, Massachusetts, that is pursuing so-called therapeutic cloning experiments, in which embryos are created and then destroyed with the aim of treating disease. Glenn McGee, a philosopher and assistant professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, quit the board last year, saying the privately held company was too secretive.
The final straw, McGee told the New York Times, came when a reporter asked him to comment for a television segment about an unidentified biotechnology company that had cloned an endangered animal. The professor replied that this was "playing God." Only later did he learn that the company was his old employer - Advanced Cell Technology.
Last spring, the Hastings Center's own bioethics journal announced that it would require contributors to disclose their financial ties. And the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities now has a task force probing the ethics of money and bioethics.
"Personally, it seems too much like bribery," Carl Elliott of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics in Minneapolis told U.S. News & World Report. "If it's not bribery, it becomes the perception of bribery."
Too little money?
Others, like the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, see no conflict. The center has accepted money from a firm called deCODE genetics to weigh ethical issues involved in the company's research in Iceland.
"The center is also doing a study on genetically modified organisms that is partly funded by DuPont and Monsanto," U.S. News said. "Center director Arthur Caplan says researchers have complete freedom. Indeed, findings critical of deCODE's work will appear in a soon-to-be-published article, according to researchers at the center."
Caplan maintains that conflicts of interest in bioethics can be managed in the same way that periodicals can remain balanced while accepting advertising revenue. The main problem with corporate money in bioethics, he says, is that there's not enough of it.
That money is a key player in the emerging biotechnologies seems axiomatic. "Vote to Criminalize Human Cloning Gives Researchers, Investors Pause," read a headline in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. The accompanying article detailed companies' and investors' fears in the wake of Tuesday's vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to ban human cloning.
"As the House stepped into scientific territory where biologists themselves have only recently dared to tread, some stocks took a battering and academic scientists wondered if one of the hottest new areas of scientific research would be squelched," the Journal reported.
Soul searching
Apart from bioethicists on company payrolls, even unrestricted gifts to bioethics centers are drawing criticism. Barbara Koenig of Stanford University recently "searched her soul" before her bioethics center accepted nearly $1 million from pharmaceutical behemoth SmithKline Beecham, according to the U.S. News report. "I called colleagues all over the country to get advice," she told the magazine.
The article then states: "Critics note that companies obviously won't fund centers that they believe will oppose their interests. Eli Lilly, for example, gave an annual $25,000 gift to the Hastings Center but stopped last year after the center's journal published articles critical of Lilly's drug Prozac."
Some bioethicists warn that taking corporate money could result in subtle shifts in what ethical questions their profession considers important to debate. "There's a risk that this kind of funding could reduce the critical edge of the field," says Dartmouth professor Ronald Green, who chairs the ethics board at Advanced Cell Technology. "That's a real concern and a real risk."
Carl Elliott of the University of Minnesota told the New York Times that the real danger is not that bioethicists will get rich from companies but that companies will use them as corporate window dressing. "Bioethics boards look like watchdogs," he said, "but they are used like show dogs."
ZEN - Zenit
06. august 2001