Ethics Lab Series Part 1

On Friday the September 4th, we held our Ethics Lab Series Part 1 workshop at Rockefeller University. 

As our participants arrived and others dropped in throughout the beginning, our presenter Jessi Hersh would go through her brief presentation on the importance of ethics in the auditorium. What started as seemingly simple questions to test the participants on what they believe is ethical and not ethical led to examining real-life historical scenarios with nuances and real consequences of misinformed, irrational decisions involving research subjects. Towards the end, we had a total of 18 participants who were fully informed of the historical past that caused the nation-wide recognition on the importance of ethics in research, along with the briefing ending off on a segue to today's modern IRB (Institutional Review Board) roleplay.

Participants–ranging from their freshman year in high school to college sophomore students–were then led to the open room area to enjoy their free pizza and had a mini-icebreaker to learn more about their peers and facilitators. Afterward, everyone was grouped up for each of the 5 hypothetical ethical case scenarios, including the most favorited case "One Treatment, Three Patients" that sparked long conversations and dilemma among the groups. For the first activity, each group was tasked to read critically, collaboratively assess and discuss the rights, wrongs, and grey areas, and debate on the precedent ethical implication of the chosen proposal(s) at hand. For their second activity, each group had to assess all previous proposals made by three other groups and come up with a final proposal. Using their creativity and public-speaking skills, each group marked down their final decision, reasonings, and acknowledgement such as the future implication(s) it’ll have on the society to then roleplay as an researcher or principal investigator presenting to a group of students.

To wrap up the workshop, we invited the participants to recap on what they learned with a fun quick trivia before announcing the prizes and awards for the most outgoing participants (check out our gallery below!).