From the Editor
I made a prototype of a molecular sensor once. It was my graduate thesis project and took about two-and-a-half years. In the day-to-day tedium of baby-sitting reactions, serving as a teaching assistant, and managing my life outside of the lab, it never occurred to me to consider if this molecular sensor could be used for nefarious purposes or whether it had societal implications. It was just a molecular sensor. Why wouldn’t that be a good idea?
Scientists were the children who asked incessant “why” questions, and, as grown-ups, decided to figure out the answers. Their ability to doggedly pursue a research question with single-minded focus is both the scientist’s blessing and curse. By removing themselves from everyday distractions, they also remove themselves from the everyday implications of their experiments. It is the bioethicist’s job to raise these questions, but like a doting new parent, researchers are prone to seeing all the good their research can do and none of the harm. That is where fiction comes in. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gave us an image of what it means to “play God” that is now part of our collective ethos even though the concept can be difficult to define.
In this collection of stories from After Dinner Conversation, we can imagine an abstract concept like Hana Arendt’s banality of evil by meeting two men in a bar in “The Mind Reader,” or the risks of dual-use technologies in “Cicada,” and the problem of distributive justice and conflicts of interest in “Bugs in the Valley.” “Mahabbah” asks whether scientists should tinker with human nature, while “Mayonnaise” is a story of unintended consequences. “We Don’t Do Faux” and “Two-Percenters” have different takes on informed consent and whether one’s privileged position is fair, while “Sow” considers ecological ethics and disrupting the natural evolution of a planet.
All these stories address research ethics questions, but rather than deliberating on things like utilitarianism and the greatest good for the greatest number of people, they show us a particular character in a specific time and place, so that we can ask ourselves, what would I have done in that situation?
Heather Zeiger − Editor