 OK. Welcome everybody to this session on a code of ethics for science. So the idea that scientists should have a code of ethics has been around for a long time and all of them I think would say implicitly they do have a code of ethics. But the attempt to formalise it which has happened from time to time has never really gained much traction because unlike engineers and unlike doctors, you don't have professional institutions who can license you to practice, for example, and therefore there is no penalty if you disobey the code. Nevertheless, in this fractured world that we've heard a lot about in this week it is important that trust in science is maintained and what we're here to discuss today is a code of practice that's been put together as a result of the initiative of the World Economic Forum which is to bring together young scientists from across the natural sciences, all of them under 40. This has been going on over the last few years but this particular initiative is a code of conduct that they have put together and just to very quickly highlight some of the aspects of it which we're going to discuss before I introduce the speakers. The headlines are engaging with the public, pursuing the truth, minimising harm, engaging with decision makers, supporting diversity, being a mentor and being accountable. If you look at the full copy of it, it's not a very big document, each of those principles, if you like, has one page where they summarise the principle, the importance of the principle, the measures by which you can strengthen it and practice it. You'll find copies over there and there is also a copy on the World Economic Forum's website. If you look at all of that, these are very big challenges actually. They sound quite simple but in fact to implement them requires structural support and I hope that some of what we'll hear today will look at the way in which institutions in science can support the scientists who wish to practice these principles explicitly. I think that's probably enough from me. You will have a chance to ask questions, I hope, although we are short for time. I can't see a clock but I have a watch. I'll try to keep track. We have three eminent speakers here, actually Jean-Pierre Bourgnon, who's president of the European Research Council, a fantastic funding agency set up within the European Union. If you're funded by them, you are a prestigious person just by definition. Jody Halpin is professor of bioethics and medical humanities at the University of California in Berkeley and Gabriella Hooke is the associate professor in information technology and electrical engineering at the very distinguished university in Switzerland, ETH Zurich. So we'll start with Gabriella, who is going to give us some of the background and motivation for this code. Gabriella. Thank you. So the young scientists, and that was one of them, came together at the meeting of the new champions in Tianjin in 2016 and on the program was a workshop which was entitled what values and rules should scientists adopt and adapt to their research. And it was moderated by Anita Farahani and the goal basically was to discuss issues that we have in our daily research and then also write this code of ethics. So we had some very interesting discussions. It went from how should I make sure that my research is not doing any harm, how can I make sure that I can justify the funding that I'm receiving, that's usually public funding and so on. So there were lots of discussions and we ended up with a bunch of principles that we felt are important to us. So we then left the meeting and later on had quite a few phone calls and discussions and I have to thank Sundrin from the World Economic Forum who basically was the glue pulling us all together to really put this in writing and so we had assigned multiple scientists to each of the seven principles so we initially had more but then realized we should combine some of them into one single one and started writing this and this is basically the outcome that we have now. Now the motivation for this were manyfold. First one, one can also put it into the relation of what we're seeing with the digitalization, with more data that we're having so people getting information from all kinds of places but also in research we're using more data on their own so how can we make sure that all of our research is still transparent and how can we make sure that the output that we're creating is credible and can be also understood by the general public. Then another motivation was that we feel that it is really, really important that we as scientists stay credible in the research that we're doing because we want to have this research have impact on policy makers and basically the research being translated into actions and if we don't adhere to something like this, like code of ethics then we're risking that we're losing that credibility so if everybody basically complies with this we can make sure that we are perceived as credible institutions so that was one of them. Then I think another maybe motivation also is that particularly as young scientists we're under a lot of pressure of delivering research having publications et cetera and to make sure that particularly during this time we're also making sure that we're not feel this pressure so much that we're not adhering to code of ethics. So these were the motivations and also as was mentioned earlier also there are various code of ethics from different institutions or groups including the institution that I'm in my community which is the electrical engineering community so there's an IEEE code of ethics and I looked it up and it was basically this long on the website each with a few bullet points very general just to give you an example one is to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological task for others only if qualified by training or experience but there's no description of what exactly this means and what it entails in terms of measures and actions then also most of these code of ethics are very specific to a particular community and that can be very different from medical to electrical engineering and there should definitely be specific codes but we felt it's necessary particularly as we're moving more towards multidisciplinary research that such a code of ethics which covers all kinds of research is very important and that's how we ended up with these seven principles so there's two versions one is a short one just one page and then a longer version which describes more about each of the principles Gabriella can I just ask you is there a way in which you and your colleagues felt this could be taken forward by any specific body or individual and how would you like to see it taken forward by somebody? Well we would, I mean our goal is that the various research institutions do endorse this or there's a way how to endorse this and make it or distribute it within their institution so the World Economic Forum of course is a fantastic platform to get this done. So let's take an example which I know you were involved with in particular which is about mentoring so what this report includes in an appendix is stories, narratives out of academic environments about which illustrate the need for these principles and I'm just going to read this out quite quickly I was fortunate enough to have three very different mentors in the early stages of my career who nevertheless had a lot in common they were supportive, demanding, passionate and creative thinking that I had no training in mentoring I later realised that they had shown me the way leading by example I now try to demonstrate the same positive behaviour in my lab and discovered how rewarding it is to see once students succeed and how lucky we are to contribute to training the next generation of scientists so that's a good news story the bad news is that you're depending on the example of your supervisors and there are plenty of people who don't necessarily have those examples and there was no training so I'm intrigued to know whether you think institutions that you know and that are probably represented in this room actually should be doing specifically more about training and about instilling a culture from the top down where academics are very resistant to that in some cases I definitely think so I think universities or general research institutions should have mentoring programmes mentoring the mentor as well as then also specifically having mentors and mentees so with the first I mean that there should be some training on how can I be a good mentor and there's a description of what we think a good mentor is building a trusted environment so that the mentee doesn't feel that there's something that the mentee can't tell because it could have some consequences that the mentor always puts the priorities for the mentee first so not the own interest and so on so just having this environment where the mentee feels comfortable so getting that into practice teaching the researchers how to be a mentor and then of course having mentorship programmes within the university then that entails senior faculty being mentors for junior ones many universities have this but maybe also giving a bit more thought to teaching how to mentor so now let's move to the funding side although Jean-Pierre you're a researcher yourself so feel free to comment on anything you want about this from your own experience but do perhaps give us your viewpoint about all of this well thank you for inviting me to contribute to this discussion which I think is a very very important one for the credibility of scientists all together and also for the healthy internal life of the scientific community so at the European Research Council maybe let me start by the structural measures we have the first one is that we have two standing committees at the European Research Council here one is committee on panels because that's the responsibility of the scientific council to choose the panel members it's hard work, it's more than 2,000 people who are members of our panel so we have to find more or less 400 to 500 every year so it's some work but the other one is called standing committee on conflict of interest misconduct and ethics and this committee of course we do have general rules about conflict of interest, about misconduct and so on but anytime the people who are monitoring the applications and also the way the research supported by ERC is developing anytime the scientific officers who are monitoring this have a doubt that is it feels slightly outside the thing then we come to this committee this committee consists of seven members of the scientific council and more or less I would say once a week we are consulted on one issue, another most of the cases it's really a conflict of interest we are extremely careful about that that is panel members who realize that actually they are associated to research which is proposed and therefore either it's really so directly involved that we just take them out or it's just that they have a marginal interaction then they will not be reporting or discussing this specific proposal but they will still be members of the panel so we try to be extremely precise about that of course the other, so this is one structural measure of course which is extremely important for us and this committee is very active and the person who chairs this is one of our vice presidents at the moment so this is one structural measure which of course is very important the other side of the thing is that every proposal which comes to ERC is going of course to a scientific review which leads to decision to fund or not fund but then after that we have an ethical review and this ethical review has different dimensions one dimension of course is to you see that one of the features of the European Union is that it has regulations on stem cells or structures things of this nature which in some cases is different from the regulation of a given country and sometimes researchers they are very much aware and their institutions what is the law in their country but they are not aware of the regulation at EU level so we need to make sure that people are actually complying because we cannot give European money if people are not respecting this law so we do that there are other dimensions which are more and more I mean there are really people care about interaction between researchers an object of research so object of research can be of course material things but they can be also people so sometimes if you are a sociologist of course you have to do field work if you are an anthropologist you have to do field work and so now you need to be sure that the rights of the people are properly done and then you are coming to extremely difficult cases so typically if you want to have ahead of time the list and the approval of the people you want to interview if they are in Amazonia of course you are not going to be able to provide this so how do you make sure to an interactive process that this has been taken care of so actually recently we were in a situation where the ethical review was becoming almost blocking the signing of some agreements because the ethical panels that actually because they were they wanted to know everything five years ahead of time and so then you are touching the one point which I really want to make that one has to be very much conscious of the huge diversity of the research and of the way you do research the way you conduct research and also the consequences so this is the second point about structural things so we are very serious about that now let me come to something different which is when we sign a contract as you know we don't sign contracts with individuals we sign contracts with the host institution and one thing now we really an institution cannot sign a contract if it doesn't have on each side a structure which will guarantee that if there is a scientific misconduct they will be able to handle it so they must have ethical panels or ethical structures to be able of course from one institution to the other it will have a different name but they should guarantee that it can deal that we are not in a position to conduct actually to conduct really enquiries on this so we have to rely on the host institution to do it and of course we come to them when we get to know that there is some problem we definitely won't go to them and tell us what you do the main difficulty and particularly now we are touching with social media is that very often if there is some kind of a rumour you know now some disciplines have some websites where you can anonymously denounce misconduct personally feel as a mathematician really something very uncomfortable about because anonymous denunciation for me is not the way we are working at least as a mathematician we don't function this way we disagree with the proof we just claim why it's wrong but maybe it's simpler in our case but anyway so this happens of course immediately in the media this is picked up but if you want to do a serious study about misconduct you need to really have the people to explain the situation some cases are very simple and clearly people have misbehaved some other cases it's much more subtle because multiple groups can be involved it has to do with relying on some data and sometimes the data is not public data so it could be quite involved and therefore you really need the inquiry to be really put together and follow following really good procedures from a justice point of view that is really somebody who is accused should have the right to defend himself or herself in a proper way until you prove that the person has misbehaved so this is really one point where definitely at this moment there is there is a tension between immediate reaction because you don't want to make money to be given to people misbehaved on the other hand you need to be sure that the way you established that people have misbehaved is really done in a very professional way respecting the rights of people so this is on the funders point of view the way we are organized that is we of course anytime we see something we get to the people with whom we signed a contract namely the hosting institution and now to finish I definitely feel that at this moment and coming to what has been said before in the training of researchers this ethical dimension is not sufficiently present and it should be done in the right way not by ending one course that you take to be sure that you are allowed to prepare a PhD but it has to be done as much as possible in relation to the work that people do so I think it has to be as concrete as possible but people I mean people in charge of labs people in charge of teams have really done this in the training of their colleagues their co-workers and I'm not sure this is done everywhere so therefore this dimension of training exposure reflection is absolutely necessary so just a comment on the the anonymous allegations side of it so now I'm speaking as an institution ourselves nature and the nature journals which have their own parallel structures to everything you've mentioned pretty much in terms of misconduct cases and how we deal with those and how we try to judge things some of those have arisen thanks to and I mean thanks to some of these anonymous websites and of course you cannot act solely on an anonymous tip-off but they do actually often so I'll mention one in particular pub here which may be the one that many life scientists think of anyway and the virtue that pub here has or has evolved anyway is that there is an there is a demand that you have some evidence for your assertion so it's not just a baseless accusation even if it's anonymous and as we know with anonymous peer review there is a virtue in anonymity sometimes and that's contentious and people can debate that but nevertheless that I think is interesting but it also refers to a developing aspect of academia which is social media and I'm not sure whether the code of ethics before I come to you Jody I will come to you but I just wanted to ask Gabriella do the social media set the context for this in any particular way or have you thought adequately as a group of young scientists about the way the social media are changing or evolving in the realm of science I can't recall if you really talked about this during the workshop but it definitely plays an important role because information gets out there so quickly and also one thing that we did certainly talk about was misrepresentation of scientific results so that somebody takes the results and then draws conclusions which we were not stating in that form so I guess with social media this is much faster propagating Well you have a principle in here that you're meant to engage as a part of your duty that's quite a tough call sometimes right Yes I mean the far behind the principle with the engaging the public has multiple dimensions one is that lots of the funding that we receive is coming from taxpayers and that we do have a responsibility to justify research that we're doing but also of course we want that the public perceives a work that we're doing as important and also uses it in possibly in their daily lives or applies certain things that we can guide them on so it's really important that we I mean one main aspect of this is also that researchers scientists we tend to present things in a language to our peers as opposed to the general public so that this is also an important aspect So before I come to that let's take a little announcement here we have in the room at least two heads of universities and they're not here on the platform so at some point at least two people in this room might have an interesting point of view to put about some of this stuff because I think the role of the institutions of themselves is absolutely crucial Jody do you make your comments generally react to whatever you've heard It's interesting because I know we have a big focus on very practical applications which I think both of you especially Jean-Pierre just now how does this really how does the rubber meet the road I hope you'll all bear with me because that's the opposite of what I was requested to do I'm a philosopher, I'm a bioethics professor so I was asked to think conceptually about these principles and what we can you know do they make sense how coherent are they and it turns out to be very relevant to I think unifying the conversation I think that these principles are they could be read as a baseline and they can also be extended to be an aspirational standard and I think that the most important thing I guess I can say today which is relevant to the university professors I mean presidents and everyone is that what people I think don't understand everybody is very familiar with conflicts of interest in every field here and I think the fact that there is so much rigor in the European Research Council about conflicts of interest is an incredible role model for the world and I knew that even before you described because I know and it's just I have so much regard for that and I think that these standards I'm going to say a lot of positive things I told Gabriella I read a lot of codes of ethics and usually they're just incoherent to be honest this is an excellent code of ethics both at the baseline on the aspirational level the thinking behind it I would read the whole document if I were anybody in this audience I'm very impressed with it but what I want to say is that the conflicts of interest where you have is basically you have something about your own self-interest that's ruling your actions so I'm very familiar with this in medical ethics where doctors do something they either don't refer a patient because it'll be they'll lose their salary in managed care if they make an expert referral or they give too many expensive treatments because they benefit they own the MRI or whatever but most of my career is much more the aspirational level and the university education level which I think we need desperately which has to do with not conflicts of interest but conflicts of obligation which is when you have two different ethical obligations that conflict with each other and how do you get educated at a high level to mentor people in that and that's where I think the conversation needs to be because to me while I applaud these principles it's very obvious to me that they conflict in many cases and there's no guidance for scientists generally into what you do when they conflict and I'll just give you a few examples it's interesting I even have a social I edited a social media one because of your question but the first example which many people here are familiar with is the when there was and you have it in your examples when synthesizing mammalian transfer strain of the bird flu virus when that was done how to synthesize it I don't know if it was nature or science you'll have to forgive me had to make a very serious decision about whether to publish it because it's a dual use issue which means people can use the mechanism to go and do a lot of bad we have Maria de Cristina from Scientific American as well as Phil and others here so that's a great example of a conflict of obligation and maybe I'll say little so you can maybe pipe in about that another conflict of obligation that many people here are probably familiar with in public health is when we had the Petra trials in sub-Saharan Africa around the late 90s we had first shown in the US and other trials that AZT reduced maternal to fetal transmission of HIV by two thirds and that was proven and then there was a desire to do studies in sub-Saharan Africa about how short a course of AZT would be able to at least reduce transmission partly because the course that reduces it by two thirds is long and expensive and there wasn't the infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa to provide that course long term and there wasn't the governance for doing that so the idea was that it was truly best to find out if a much shorter, more efficient and economic treatment might at least reduce some degree of transmission but to find out according to the high standards of certain scientists who were very ethical and their ideals there had to be a placebo group but that Marsha Angel, the editor of the New England Journal and many others found that really appalling because it was proven that it would reduce maternal fetal transmission to be research subjects in sub-Saharan Africa where they would be randomized to placebo so that they would be pregnant have an HIV positive situation where they would transmit to their feasts and we wouldn't protect them from that so there's a lot, there's huge clash in two really important ethical systems there and then I can give you a social media one quickly where I worked with Kyle Pruitt who's a child psychology researcher many many years ago at Yale and he did research on parents with working moms and found that the children had higher school performance, better health all this stuff and what he was showing really is that when you have a working mom with a stay at home dad the child actually gets more hours of contact from both parents because working mothers at the end of the day still spend a lot of time with the children, this is 20 years ago so that was really what he showed and he was very rigorous about it was the number of hours a day a parent spends with a child has a huge positive impact on the child's well-being but I was with him when we met with the New York Times and he said they are going to misreport this is before we even had social media it was just media like the New York Times and we sat there and watched the front page of the New York Times say fathers produce better children than mothers and we watched it happen we reported it accurately, I tried to help him with the ethics of it so now it's a million times bigger so those are examples of conflicts of obligation I'll just submit that at Berkeley we have doctoral level scientists take rigorous courses with me about a systematic way to approach these conflicts and I wish we had more time to talk about it Thanks very much You mentioned the avian flu examples and actually I wrongly said it was science it was actually science and nature we both had papers the one I thought you were referring to was and this is an interesting case of harm or alleged harm so science did publish a paper where people synthesised a virus a smallpox a pox virus and a lot of people could see no point in that experiment and it was reintroducing a harmful organism in a way that was unnecessary but you can have an argument about that what was a much more interesting argument so I'm not going to take long about this but it does relate to some of the issues we've talked about when the national science advisory board for biosecurity advised in the US that these two papers submitted to science so this was while they were submitted to nature and to science which showed how you could make a flu virus more transmissible and in so doing we're trying to explain how diseases are transmitted and therefore what you might do for example in future development of vaccinations so there was a completely virtuous motivation behind this nevertheless the academics especially on NSABB were saying that this is too risky because this could be used as a weapon and so there was ages of discussion involving the National Institute of Health the security community and so on about whether we should publish them redacted whether you should publish it taking away the information and after a lot of cogitation about that we decided we would never do that you simply cannot publish redacted papers to whom do you then decide you're going to supply the information and so on this is a particular case but one of the interesting things was that the security community were much more willing to see these papers published than some academics who were somehow being protective beyond their own responsibilities so that was interesting but also once you saw these academics in the room in particular you were just so taken by their commitment to safety in the labs that you were reassured and you could feel the tone of one of the critical meetings changing because this person was there and conveying this do no harm type of ethos the other one wasn't quite so responsible in his presentation and if it had just been him I don't quite know how that might have gone so I'm just saying how safety and adherence to statutes if you like, statutory things which can get quite shoddy if you're not careful is absolutely crucial as part of this code and I think it's in there I think it's to do with the harm paragraph okay enough from me I just wanted to ask one more question about the institutions of science before turning over to the audience to ask them to make some comments or to question you guys so in Britain a funding agency did something quite draconian you made the point Jean-Pierre that you're not able to fund universities that do not have in place a code of practice about misconduct and that's quite a general situation not a goal, it's a structure sorry a formal structure that is there to deal with it and one of the funders in Britain did something much more draconian in relation to culture in a university in the universities in Britain so there is a thing called the Athena Swan scheme where an external body validates actions taken by an organisation and usually universities on behalf of women how do you run your department on behalf of the success of the career ambitions of women how do you arrange meeting timetables do you provide crush support very practical stuff if you have a bronze certificate you're showing willingness by having a plan if you get a silver certificate you've achieved something over three years and the head of a funding agency the national institute of health research in Britain which is the biggest single public funding agency decided that if you didn't have a silver certificate of proven development in this particular area she would not fund you that was really draconian people now are studying the outcome of that and they're going in and doing qualitative surveys of academics there was one recent one about Oxford and it absolutely did have some impact and people speak generally favourably even though you can game it and so on so Jean-Pierre do you see funding agencies not just the ERC which of course is dealing with many countries but national funding agencies as able to put leverage not just on that issue which is included in here in the university the interests of underrepresented groups but also some of the other almost philosophical points in this document I think for sure we have a responsibility because definitely we make research possible so from that point of view we are in the sense of the fuel of research so if you turn the tap off then of course it has consequences the point I was making referring to in our pre-discussion in the sense that in the case of Europe actually the level of organization of the various countries the various institutions is diverse enough that if you just come up with a measure that you describe which I in a sense feel comfortable about in its aim in its philosophy definitely it will be seen by some countries or some institutions as definitely something which discriminates against them because they have not reached this level of organization and also as you know the situation particularly in terms of promotion of women among scientists which is certainly something absolutely fundamental to do is in different countries taken differently so at this moment we don't have a playing level field that we can use but still for funding agencies I think because of their role and also because at ERC we take that very seriously and also because of the scientific events which is really the agency which is managing the program is really visiting every year a very significant number of institutions and very often also bringing researchers from other institutions nearby to just explain how we function to get critiques but also at the same time use these channels to explain how we monitor for example the situation of women in ERC or we have identified things which are really taking women away from the contract also concerning ethics this is something which is discussed systematically first by describing what we do but also explaining things we may do so people have to prepare themselves so I think we have a pedagogical dimension of course can go up to the level you mentioned which is you just start to tell people yes you do that no way in the case of ERC I think it will be difficult to implement it this way partly because the certification you described would have to be agreed at the European level which I don't see it happening tomorrow morning but nevertheless I think this issue of diversity is very very critical and particular gender of promotion in which in almost everything means promotion of women is absolute priority I must say on this side we took a significant number of measures which are slightly different from the one you said for example one thing we do we have three programs one which called starting ones from two to seven years of the PhD the other one considered the data seven to twelve years which is the way we prioritise younger people and for women who have children automatically the upper limit 7 or 12 is pushed by 18 months per child without any other indication just the birth certificate for men this can be pushed if they have taken the lever of absence and actually what is remarkable is that this is not only formally implemented but it works that is the success rate of women who are above the limit is absolutely the same as the others so this is one way of telling people we definitely want to promote women and we know that the impact for the moment maybe it will change and taking care of children is much more important on women's career than others Gabriella Andrew I will be very interested to hear of your views about the sort of teeth might be required or external pressures that might be required to give teeth to seeing these develop so Gabriella perhaps you would like to start if you think of the institutions you know how would you like them to be forced to do more than they are doing oh cool actually hard question well I mean or wish definitely is as I mentioned earlier that all of the heads of the research institution possibly also some funding agencies do take a look at this and formally not just say we think it's great but formally endorse it and say this is going to be a code of ethics that we stand behind and will push also within our institution so that's the way how we're seeing it but if we're getting of course support also from funding agencies such as ERC of course that would be fantastic well I think I love all these ideas I think that the teeth thing is not my specialty so I trust those who work a lot on adherence but I do think that the point I made about these values conflicting poses a bit of a challenge for the teeth thing because then the point is that we I guess what I think we need is I think we need higher education to think systemically about ethics and just not just so basically what I say to my doctoral students in the sciences who I focus on is we're not here to be the ethics police you are a lot of what we talked about today is you know misbehavior and conflicts of interest very important to have standards but that's the minimum thing but now we're talking about these aspirational goals of making ethics really I'm sorry making science really truth seeking really inclusive etc and to me because they can conflict and they will all these goals will conflict with each other people need rigorous education in ethical reasoning which is just as rigorous a science education and so the question is how to get the funding and support at the university level to have that be what I'd rather have a requirement of how to put teeth anywhere I'd like to have every doctoral student not just have one of those superficial IRB fake compliance courses but I'd like them to have to pass a rigorous exam showing how they would deal with certain ethical dilemmas and I'd like then everybody who will become ahead of a lab someday will have really learned how to do that thinking because I think some people don't know how to I don't think that many people even at the World Economic Forum have the tools of reasoning to look at these things where almost everybody here knows how to make a statistical assessment or something like that that we're missing, philosophical literacy that I think we're missing I can give two examples of where endorsement a formal endorsement is necessary but maybe not sufficient if you see what I mean but necessary so one is in the dual use stuff so a whole group of editors got together and all signed up to setting up mechanisms within the journals to cope with dual use papers just to be mindful about how you're going to get extra security advice as to whether this thing should be published or not or what the risks and benefits are and I think on the whole that's worked I think a lot of journals have certainly done that and they put their names on a website so you can always refer to them if it's not happening and other cases the National Science Foundation who make it a condition of funding at least of some of their grants that you do have to have a mentoring process in place for postdocs and they're the first to admit I have to say that they cannot police that so how much teeth you can give to that requirement is an interesting question so we've had a good expose of some of these things we haven't gone into depth in the thing I hope some of you may have already had a chance to read it if you haven't ever mined you've heard what we've said feel free to make a comment put up your hand and we need to have a microphone so I see at least three people, thank you very much and do say who you are and what you do My name is Tim Fell, I'm the CEO of a company called Symthase which produces software for the life sciences WF Technology Pioneer the company as well thank you very much, absolutely stimulating discussion I could ask a thousand questions the first observation I would make is that you seem to be talking about academia but I would just like to say that this of course extends to industry Gabriela, I'm sure you looked at many different codes and practices in 2007 in the UK so David King came up with Code and Practice for Science with seven bullet points really one of the number four is that you must act lawfully I don't see lawfully in here at all and I would have thought that should be front and centre did you discuss it? Well I mean we, as I actually mentioned earlier there are certain basics that you need to I mean that's things like conflict of interest and things like that which are the absolute basis that you need to adhere to and the standard or the code of ethics that we wrote was more of this what you mentioned in terms of aspirational so being lawful for me will be something which is which is a basic I mean if I'm not lawful then I have trouble somewhere else not with the code of ethics but yeah I think that's maybe one of the reasons why it's not explicitly mentioned Do you want to come back? Well let me move on because we do have some other people so over there microphone and then there Brian Schmidt Australian National University I'm the vice chancellor and president of that so in terms of being aspirational I think it's quite strong but if you read it and I have to for example I have been asked to see if I would endorse this and in my university although I could endorse it as the chancellor it really needs to go through what we call the academic board and the academic board is going to see the conflicts and we'll chew it to bits that way and it also has to me a sense of each individual is responsible for doing that and I'll give you an example where that might be problematic I have a whole range of people and I intentionally keep some of my staff from mentoring and I intentionally keep some of my staff from going to government people and telling them what they're doing because that is not a strong skill set from them and I do not want to subject anyone to them. Isaac Newton would be a good example of someone who you would not want to be mentoring people but he was a very important person so it's not my ideal staff member but the reality is I have people like that so I think as an institutional level I can probably assign up to it on an aspirational thing as long as I realize that I'm going to hold myself sort of it's not a you know a black line thing which it sort of feels like right now and which would be problematic I mean maybe just to add on that I think that's also one of the reasons why we didn't call it code of conduct but code of ethics and that was we had some discussions regarding this and coming in this aspirational thing that's why we called it code of ethics. I let other people speak but I'm on board with that completely and I think that it should not be rejected I didn't really think I would suggest a very practical thing but it may be that the report if it's not too late is it too late to add or change anything? I mean we're always happy to take... It might be worth having some kind of paragraph saying that acknowledgement that there are conflicts of obligation and that there's a hope for rigorous ethics training about the judgment involved about the decisions you're talking about and something like that so that it doesn't immediately get rejected because people don't understand that you knew that. Okay, next one. Hi, I'm Max Price I'm the president of the University of Cape Town and my comment is particularly to John Peir and to the potential funders. I absolutely agree with you that central funders, large funders cannot police the implementation and monitoring of the codes and guidelines of ethics that does have to be devolved to the institutions and therefore those institutions have to have the structures but there's a real risk that particularly given the inequality of institutional resources and the history of that that reinforces that divide between who can do research and who can't and who can get funding and who can't especially between the global north and south and that if that becomes as it should be a requirement of the funding and it's especially a problem where because there are economies of scale of such structures if you are doing a lot of research the number of IRBs or people involved in that doesn't, it's not a linear relationship to the amount of research that you're doing and so if one is on the development curve for research universities the costs of that are much higher and my plea would be to explicitly allow the funding of those institutional structures that both do the training have the codes but police ensure that the data is kept for 15 years ensure that there's regular auditing of the work that's going on and that's built into and funded by the grants possibly differentially from institutions which already have those structures widely in place Well, I think you're touching some of the limitations of organisation at the level of the European Union in our case in the sense that the money we are given is as the very specific purpose of supporting research so for example, supporting institution would get together to improve this situation would be for the moment outside our things we can legally fund and this is part of the things we are looking at the next framework programme 2021-2027 so we're looking for more agility for the European Research Council and among the agility definitely we feel that we should be able to really accompany this and encourage and support actions of this nature for the moment this is not possible or only in ways which are so complicated that we actually don't do it but we feel that definitely we should have the lever to look at the amount of money which would be needed to have an impact for such things compared to our budget I mean our budget every year is more or less 2 billion euro and of course the amount of money you are talking about if you really want to company and encourage and make it more visible you are talking about 100,000 of euros so it's totally I mean should be just a trivial thing to do for the moment, legally it's very complicated so definitely we're looking forward to be more proactive in this way that is to encourage but really show that we are committed to this to happen but we need to progress on that so this is just to show that the urgency for us of ethical review shows that we have just created in the scientific council really a task force on this and the next plenary meeting will be have the first report of the task force so for us it's really a priority at this moment to be better to be more efficient to be better organized which is completely endorsed by the members of the scientific council Okay, well at this moment this task force was really meant to be very practical in the sense to review what we have been doing to improve it but maybe we should really actually it could be something we should take up at the global research council meeting every year and that maybe we should join forces on this that is really have established worldwide some kind of and maybe bringing up actually this called ethics called for ethics for science Next point from the audience Suzanne Forzie I'm a principal and vice chancellor of McGill University and I think it's great that the young scientists have had these workshop and produced this document whether I could bring it to my campus and maybe we think about this in a traditional way but I think it would be difficult because while everybody reading those principal would say yes, yes but they wouldn't call them all principal some would be goals and some would be principles many people would say not engaging with decision makers is unethical no many people would say no it's not unethical not to engage with them it's a good thing to do if we want our science to have impact if we want our policy makers to have evidence based policy we should do that but it wouldn't be at the level of those principles that are deep down like integrity accountability for example I'll give you just another example supporting diversity to me at the deep down level it is designing experiment that brings a set of data that will provide a non-bias result it would be unethical to design an experiment that doesn't do that now attracting people who have not participated in science is a great thing to do we all endorse that but it would be a goal an aspirational goal as you put it and it may be just a matter of defining the words but principles are deep rooted as protecting not only academia but of course the whole enterprise of research we have to be very very clear as to what are the lines in the sand and as we know it's not simple because many times even those deep rooted principles will clash and then the question is there one that dominates is there one that is more important than the others that's very very difficult Can I just ask you a question at the university if you put this in front of people you stimulated a discussion can't you see something coming out and sticking to the wall that is a step forward and are you willing to do that? There would be certainly a very lively discussion I can tell you that people will not want to see each one of those called a principle it's the word principle because we have principles in our university and it would find it difficult to have that label The thing I wanted to not allow the discussion this is a criticism at all this is exactly right about exactly what will happen in academia, no question but at the same time we can't have a collective editing session where we get all the words exactly right so the best hope for this to have an impact is to take it out there acknowledge that the language is imprecise and flawed or aspirational even if there's just one that then sticks that would be great Can I quickly ask if this would be redefined as it's a goals then you wouldn't see a problem with this? I don't want to put you on the spot but in general I'm pursuing the truth it's not just a goal it is a deep rooted principle and there's no good scientific enterprise if we can't commit to that principle Next comment or question I'd like to follow up on the point that was initially raised Sorry, I'm Iwukau Keke I'm a professor at the University of Ibado in Nigeria I'd like to follow up on the point raised by the president of UCT about the need for actually supporting the creation of structures in institutions in resource limited countries We actually have an example of how this worked very well I think 25 years ago most human research was done without IRB approval in African countries and now most institutions have got IRBs most African journals require ethical approval before they would publish studies and so I think it serves as a model for us to create those structures and funding agencies that fund a lot of sustainable health research and similar multi-country research to consider it as towards the goal of supporting diversity in helping to build the structures as part of helping to ensure that science occurs in those countries Right Gabriela, do you want to say any more about the interests of under quote under resourced environments and where they represented in your group I don't have in mind who Do you have in mind To be honest I don't have I remember the people and that's who you're interacting with so I only know remember from a few where exactly they came from these are 30 people coming from all kinds of backgrounds so I can't recall But anyway that's a good example One here If I can give some practical advice from my experience these are great whether they're values, goals or principles we've written them down but you've got to live your values that's what counts and how do you do that we don't want this to become a box ticking exercise and yes I've now I'm ethical and you can look at other industries some industries are not so good the medical industry is great if you ask doctors whether they're doing well they say we're doing terribly well one of the reasons is they only kill one person at a time if you look at the airline industry they kill 300 people at a time when a plane falls out of the sky everybody dies and the culture in that industry is completely different everybody from the ground staff to the pilots to the CEO are always asking one question they ask what does an early warning look like so if I'm thinking of doing some research I have a I have a postulation I think I know what's going to happen and then I can sort of construct what might or might not go wrong but if you ask what does an early warning look like you put yourself in a different position you say to yourself something has already gone wrong not it might go wrong it already has gone wrong what does that look like so just a little bit of practical advice if you can stimulate that in your institutions or your companies or in your labs you can actually live these values can I do a real quick follow up just I think that learning to identify the values at stake and the research as you design the project and show where they're conflicting values would be a way to do that not a warning of a problem but even identifying in every project what values it's serving thank you very much please I'm Mark Wright, Chancellor President of Washington University in St. Louis we have a very large research enterprise I'm a scientist myself and there are two points in this code that interest me one is pursuing truth and I see so much in biological biomedical research that's emerging as not reproducible and I wonder how such a document can improve the situation the second is I really like this notion on mentorship in the United States at least and there are different countries represented here with different policies but in the United States our federal support is predicated on the notion that PhD research and education are inextricably intertwined but what's evolved over time and I see it especially with NIH funded research that the students are being regarded as employees by their research mentors and they're not being given the opportunity for education so I really think this area of mentorship is extremely important and PhDs need to be prepared more broadly than just a research and some of them call themselves I'm a research slave absolutely and I think we need some strength in this kind of recommendation to improve PhD education at least in the United States but can I just ask you in your position do you feel able to develop the strength of that culture if you like and practice within your university it's a very worthwhile discussion and a document like this can really stimulate reassessment and perhaps the development of procedures within our university that could improve PhD education so we're running out of time because in fact we have run out of time I'm just going to ask Gabriella thank you very much for the document you and your colleagues is this it or can you revise it are you going to try and get feedback of this sort anymore because we can run with this as you've seen we definitely love to get your feedback I need to talk to the world economic forum people in what sense we can still adapt it but nevertheless we would love to see feedback and comments about it good thank you to everyone who contributed and thank you to the panelists for contributing as well thank you