Chemical Ethics

Web Resources

Most of the hundreds of scientific ethics internet pages are lists of links to other pages, online syllabi, or bibliographies.  The following two pages distinguish themselves by their depth, breadth, and ease of use.  They include bibliographies, syllabi, links, and interactive areas for students and faculty.

The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science <http://www.onlineethics.org/index.html> is a very professional and very complete site designed for students in the sciences and engineering.  The Center supports a "Help Desk" for students needing advice on ethical problems as well as areas with ethics resource materials, cases, codes, diversity and gender issues, problems in the corporate world, etc.  There is also an extensive bibliography and a helpful glossary of ethics terms. It is supported by Case Western Reserve University.

Teaching Research Ethics (TRE) <http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/tre.html> is a project by the Poynter Center at the University of Indiana.  This site, while less polished than the previous one, is full of useful information, including annotated bibliographies, an online book titled Moral Reasoning in Scientific Research:  Cases for Teaching and Assessment (available for download using Adobe Acrobat), and a very extensive annotated list of web resources (including syllabi).  This site also offers Case Builder, a Macintosh program which helps instructors create ethics cases for study in class.

Newsgroups/Listservs

Listservs are a good way to keep in touch with the major thinkers in a field.  I found only one listserv which deals with ethics in science.  SCIFRAUD is an open listserv maintained by SUNY-Albany. The address for subscribing is <listserv@cnsibm.albany.edu>.

"SCIFRAUD is dedicated to the discussion of fraud in science.... Then, too, there are topics with which the board has been concerned: the prevalence of fraud in science, the use of fraud and dishonesty productively in science, the structure of science, competition in science, Institutionalized Science, and the history of fraud in science."