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Pomona
College Senior Coauthors Study on Ethical
Decision-Making in Bioscience Firms Published in Nature
Biotechnology
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“A survey of the ethical practices of bioscience companies,”
published in the March issue of Nature Biotechnology,
“suggests that although most firms feature ethics in their
mission statement or code of conduct, fewer than half of the
companies surveyed have made any formal efforts to assess
how well these approaches are working,” according to authors
David Finegold and Allison Moser.
Among the pair’s findings:
• When bioscience companies were asked to rank a series of
different areas as possible sources of ethical issues, they
most commonly cited employee misbehavior, followed by the
conduct of clinical trials, legal compliance and marketing.
• Many bioscience companies are devoting substantial
attention to ethical issues. All companies report taking the
first step of including ethics in their mission statements
and codes of conduct, and most have gone further,
incorporating ethics into their hiring process, employee
evaluations and training.
• However more than half of companies have made no effort to
engage in ethics discussions with the firm's stakeholders or
to evaluate the effectiveness of their programs. Only a
third feature ethics when assessing corporate performance or
conduct a social or ethics audit. Rather than incorporating
ethics into their core strategic discussions and performance
management systems, most firms focus on legal compliance as
their top reason for focusing on ethical issues
The study was inspired by a series of high-profile events
that have undermined public faith in the bioscience
industry. The authors noted that, “The problem is most acute
for the pharmaceutical industry, which as recently as 1997
had public approval ratings of 80%; today, it is viewed by a
majority of Americans as doing ‘a bad job’ for consumers,
with only 13% of Americans believing that the pharmaceutical
industry is ‘generally honest and trustworthy.’”
The survey was sent to the 100 largest U.S. biotech and
pharmaceutical firms along with a sampling of smaller
organizations to try to document their ethics policies and
practices. The results from the 29 companies that responded
to the survey are presented in the article. The survey was
designed to complement and put into context the results from
detailed case studies of ethical decision-making in 13
leading bioscience firms published in BioIndustry Ethics.
A resident of La Jolla, Moser is a senior at Pomona College,
majoring in biology. Her senior thesis focuses on measuring
the changing stress and weight levels of first-year college
students. To measure stress levels, she is analyzing the
salivary levels of the hormone cortisol. Pomona College, one
of the nation’s premier liberal arts colleges, is located in
Claremont, CA, and is known for its student research
opportunities. Moser began work on the ethics study at the
Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in summer
2004 as part of its Research Experience for Undergraduates
program funded by the National Science Foundation.
David Finegold, is a professor at the Keck Graduate
Institute of Applied Life Sciences, the newest member of the
Claremont, Colleges. He is a coauthor of the book
BioIndustry Ethics (Elsevier, 2005), 13 case studies in
ethical decision-making in bioscience companies. Prior to
teaching at KGI, Finegold was an associate research
professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at
University of Southern California's Marshall School of
Business.
Nature Biotechnology is a monthly journal covering the
science and business of biotechnology. It publishes new
concepts in technology/methodology of relevance to the
biological, biomedical, agricultural and environmental
sciences as well as covers the commercial, political,
ethical, legal, and societal aspects of this research. The
first function is fulfilled by the peer-reviewed research
section. |
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