Sept. 16, 2002

Center for Ethics and Complex Systems Studies Impact of Technological Change

Thomas Griffin
Kim Fortun

The advent of technology and its use to mine great databases of biological information is both a boon and a bane for ethicists, scientists, and policymakers. Rensselaer's Center for Ethics and Complex Systems has been created to conduct social, ethnographic, and historical research into the way technological change drives scientific and societal change — and to contribute to the establishment of "best practices" for biotechnology.

"Ten years ago, scientists didn't have to deal with such massive data flows as we see now," said center director Kim Fortun. "While the speed and complexity of this research has spawned many hopes, it has also given rise to many unanswered ethical questions. Traditional bioethics is so rigid there is no nuance. We want to get at the work-a-day ethics to write the history of changing ethical sensibilities of scientific practice."

The center's mission, according to Fortun, is to understand and address the ethical implications of new technologies, including those brought about by emerging biotech research areas such as pharmacogenomics and toxicogenomics, which make use of tiny "labs on a chip" called microarrays.

Pharmacogenomics is the attempt to identify an individual's variation in drug response to create "designer" drugs for individuals. Toxicogenomics combines information from microarray results, proteomics, and other genetic studies to model biological and environmental stressors.

While both fields of study have been recognized as having wide-ranging social impacts, neither research area has been studied in depth by social scientists, Fortun says.

The Center for Ethics and Complex Systems is housed within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and its core members include science and technology professors Mike Fortun, a historian and bioethicist; Edward Woodhouse, a political scientist; and Nancy Campbell, a policy historian.