Andy Lau

Precision medicine is an emerging approach to treatment and disease prevention that relies on linkages between very large datasets of health information that is shared amongst researchers and health professionals. While studies suggest broad support for sharing precision medicine data with researchers at publicly funded institutions, there is reluctance to share health information with private industry for research and development. As the private sector is likely to play an important role in generating public benefits from precision medicine initiatives, it is important to understand what the concerns are and how they might be mitigated. This study reports outcomes of a deliberative method of citizen engagement in Singapore that asked whether sharing precision medicine data with private industry would be permissible, and if so, under what circumstances. Findings from this citizens’ jury suggest sharing with industry would be permissible under certain conditions that are set out in nine recommendations. Implications of the recommendations and their underlying assumptions for policy decision makers are discussed. This study aligns with prior international studies which found conditional acceptance for data sharing with private industry, a public benefit requirement, specific reluctance to share with insurance companies and an emphasis on accountability and transparency to demonstrate trustworthiness. However, our results differ from prior studies in that opt-in consent did not dominate the deliberations as jurors were able to set it aside as an assumed prerequisite for participation in a precision medicine programme.

This is an examination of three main strategies used by engineering educators to integrate ethics into the engineering curriculum. They are: (1) the standalone course, (2) the ethics imperative mandating ethics content for all engineering courses, and (3) outsourcing ethics instruction to an external expert. The expectations from each approach are discussed and their main limitations described. These limitations include the insular status of the stand-alone course, the diffuse and uneven integration with the ethics imperative, and the orphaned status of ethics using the outside expert.A fourth option is proposed — a special modular option. This strategy avoids the limitations of earlier approaches and harmonizes well with curricular objectives and professional values. While some help is provided by a professional ethicist, the headliner for the series of seminars is a high-profile engineer who shares an ethics dilemma encountered in professional practice. Students discuss the case and propose solutions.The goal is to make ethics applicable to real-life problems facing working engineers and to help change behaviors.

One of the methods used at Penn State to teach engineering students about ethics is a one-credit First-Year Seminar entitled “How Good Engineers Solve Tough Problems.” Students meet in class once a week to understand ethical frameworks, develop ethical problem-solving skills, and to better understand the professional responsibilities of engineers. Emphasis is on the ubiquity of ethical problems in professional engineering. A learning objective is the development of moral imagination, similar to the development of technical imagination in engineering design courses. Making sound arguments is also addressed in the process of reasoning through cases, and critiquing other’s arguments. Over the course of the semester, students solve five engineering ethics cases. Each week, a student team of four people is responsible for reading the assigned section of the text, developing a summary, and leading the class discussion.