Collaborative ethics: innovating collaboration between ethicists and life scientists; Nature, June 20, 2024

Jeantine E. Lunshof & 

Julia Rijssenbeek 

, Nature ; Collaborative ethics: innovating collaboration between ethicists and life scientists

"Is there a place for ethics in scientific research, not about science or after scientific breakthroughs? We are convinced that there is, and we describe here our model for collaboration between scientists and ethicists.

Timely collaboration with ethicists benefits science, as it can make an essential contribution to the research process. In our view, such critical discussions can improve the efficiency and robustness of outcomes, particularly in groundbreaking or disruptive research. The discussion of ethical implications during the research process can also prepare a team for a formal ethics review and criticism after publication.

The practice of collaborative ethics also advances the humanities, as direct involvement with the sciences allows long-held assumptions and arguments to be put to the test. As philosophers and ethicists, we argue that innovative life sciences research requires new methods in ethics, as disruptive concepts and research outcomes no longer fit traditional notions and norms. Those methods should not be developed at a distance from the proverbial philosopher’s armchair or in after-the-fact ethics analysis. We argue that, rather, we should join scientists and meet where science evolves in real-time: as Knoppers and Chadwick put it in the early days of genomic science, “Ethical thinking will inevitably continue to evolve as the science does”1."