Paved With Good Intentions: Rethinking the Ethics of ELSI Research

Ethical, Legal and Social Implications ("ELSI") research has played an increasingly important role in scientific research. Tens of millions of dollars, many of which are public, are spent funding scientific research projects. Taxpayers are demanding that scientific advancement move forward, hand-in-hand with careful examination of the many ethical and social issues that are raised by the emerging sciences. It is not uncommon to find grants that include ELSI components. This raises a potential problem relating to the ability of ethicists to undertake serious, objective reflection and make independent, normative suggestions. If the Principal Investigator (PI) of the grant controls the funding of the ethics component and ELSI reflection suggests acts or omissions that would negatively affect the PI's scientific project, especially given the current economic climate in which reductions in ethics and humanities funding jeopardize other employment, ethicists may be placed in a position of having to decide between seriously jeopardizing their career, or ignoring the moral problem and compromising their professional integrity. One suggestion to avoid this conflict is to separate the funding of ELSI components from the scientific portion of the grant and to erect a secure firewall between the two. Other solutions certainly exist, and the purpose of this paper is to raise the issue to stimulate debate.