As part of a grant from the University of Miami School of Medicine, E4 adapter peer-reviewed ethics case studies to its Crucial Choices format. Below is the "before" case study and the "after" adaptation.
“Truth and Consequences”
Julio Cruz and Samantha Bergen are both graduate students working with Dr. Mark Chan, an eminent immunologist. Although both are in their fourth year of study, neither has published a manuscript. Both are beginning to worry that if they do not publish soon they will not be able to obtain good postdoctoral positions.
Finally, Julio's project starts to look promising. After many months of effort, he believes that he has isolated and purified a viral protein (RG198) that could be useful to immunize non-human primates against the retrovirus responsible for AIDS. Julio now has to repeat the purification process to make more RG198 for additional analysis and sequencing. Dr. Chan is very excited about Julio's progress and tells him to repeat his experiment and to begin to write up the results. Some parts of the isolation and purification process are novel enough to be published in an important journal, such as Nature.
Although only small amounts of RG198 are available, Julio and Dr. Chan agree that they must push ahead and work quickly. In order to help Julio as he works on manufacturing more RG198 for the next set of experiments, Dr. Chan tells Julio that he will recruit Samantha to assist Julio in some analyzes. Samantha
Before
After
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has not been very successful with her project, which involves the isolation and purification of a cytokine receptor from a subclass of human T-cells. Dr. Chan feels that performing the analyses will teach her some skills that she could apply to her own project. Julio does not think highly of Samantha, believing her to be sloppy, but he needs to move ahead with his research.