CATHERINE MILNE

4. MARIE CURIE, ETHICS AND RESEARCH

INTRODUCTION Recently Chemistry and Engineering News (Bard, Prestwich, Wight, Heller, & Zimmerman, 2010) carried a series of commentaries on the culture of academic research in chemistry with a focus on the role of funding in research. Initially, Alan Bard decried how decisions about tenure seem more and more to focus on grant getting rather than consideration of the applicant’s accomplishments generated because of access to this funding. Bard argued further that often this funding was based, not on the quality of the proposed research but on a researcher’s ability to “hype their research” and damming truth in the process (Bard et al., 2010, p. 27). According to him, there was a disturbing trend in universities for researchers to be encouraged, almost expected, to generate patents and from there, even to be involved in initiating “start up” companies. Other researchers responded. Glen Prestwich and Charles Wight (Bard et al., 2010) argue that if researchers were able to present a clear connection between “taxpayer dollars” and funded research, the public would realize the value that science delivers. Prestwich and Wight argue further that a new cadre of researchers is involved in identifying real world problems, translating basic research into applications, and creating products as well as publications. Moving from basic research to applications that address real world problems is called translational research, and Prestwich and Wight see this research as a positive development in chemistry. Adam Heller (Bard et al., 2010) weighs in claiming that the pursuit of “patent-protected, people-serving products” was not “a sad sign of our times but a reawakening of the proud history of academic chemistry and chemical engineering” (p. 29). I find it interesting that one of Heller’s choices for historical examples of chemists that had transcended academic chemistry and chemical engineering was Fritz Haber. For me Haber is a challenging figure in chemistry research because although he won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements” (The Nobel Foundation, 2010), which allowed the Earth to support many more humans than before, he also played a significant role in the German development of poison gas during World War I. Heller’s reference to Haber raised the issue of the role of ethics in research. Comments by Prestwick and Wight also led me to reflect on reports of how Marie and Pierre Curie conducted research and disseminated their findings in the identification of two new elements, polonium and radium, and their exploration of the phenomenon Marie Curie called radioactivity. Historian of science, Helena Pycior (1993) notes that Marie Curie made sure readers were made

M.-H. Chiu, P. J. Gilmer, and D. F. Treagust (Eds.), Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 87–102. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. CATHERINE MILNE aware of the fact that Marie proposed this term in her biography of Pierre Curie (Curie, 1923). Unlike Haber, whose role in developing chemical weapons in World War I makes him in some respects a more challenging scientific figure to endorse wholeheartedly, Marie Curie has no such problems. In her own writing and that of her biographers, Curie is presented as espousing very clearly ideas about the nature of scientific endeavor that take on an almost fantastical quality in our cybermodern era, but values that were heartfelt, and consistent with the modernist era in which she lived and worked. As I hope to show in this chapter, Marie Curie was no shrinking violet when it came to supporting and endorsing industry, especially if it allowed her to further develop and maintain the field of radioactivity, and her approach was entirely consistent with ethical theories that are part of modernist philosophy. Both these contemporary examples and Marie Curie’s history as a researcher raise for me questions of what role ethics play in scientific research, whether success in science is really only about patenting a new process or product, and the possible role of existing ideologies in the way researchers frame ethics associated with the practice and outcomes of their research. In the following sections I will try to explore these questions.

SO WHAT ARE ETHICS? Applied ethics is an attempt to “apply moral principles to a concrete world of practice” (May, 1980, p. 358). Marie Curie is a good case study to examine research and ethics even though her writings and those of her biographers sometimes do not let us see behind the heroic façade. In this chapter, I seek to explore Curie’s evolving ethical stance in the scientific enterprise, in particular her desire to ensure the longevity of research associated with the chemistry, physics, and biomedical applications of radium. Her research provides a context for considering the nature and role of ethics in scientific and chemical research. From a universal perspective, research ethics can be thought of as a set of principles about how researchers should conduct themselves when they are engaged in research (Shrader-Frechette, 1994). Historically, these consisted of philosophical recommendations that became accepted as “communal codes of behavior” (p. 2). For example, philosopher Francis Bacon (1620/1968) when proposing a new sense-based philosophy for generating new knowledge via experiment recommended the use of witnesses that could verify the observations or ‘matters of fact’ claimed by an experimental philosopher like Robert Boyle. In her book, Ethics of Scientific Research, Kristin Shrader-Frechette (1994) notes historic interest in what should constitute the norms of experimental research; however, calls for a code of ethics typically are associated with the professionalization of various science disciplines, suggesting that codes constitute agreed communal practices to which individual members are expected to conform. Today much research is conducted in universities or industries rather than private laboratories in people’s homes or in laboratories maintained by professional organizations, such as the Royal Society of London. University research generates

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