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Ethics reviews need upgrade, experts say

By Zhang Zhihao | China Daily | Updated: 2019-02-12 09:28

Lagging guidelines

Zhai Xiaomei, executive director of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences' research center for bioethics, said China's academic research on bioethics began in the early 1980s, but its ethics guidelines and regulations relating to biomedical research involving humans are behind those found in developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

A key reason for the lax oversight is a lack of ethics review boards, both in number and capability, Zhai said.

According to a survey of 324 institutions around the country by the China Association for Science and Technology last year, 87.5 percent of medical and health institutions have ethics regulatory bodies, such as an ethics review board.

But for universities the figure was 17.6 percent, the survey found, while at research institutes it was 5.4 percent and at companies just 1 percent. Moreover, many ethics review boards are staffed by scholars who are not professionally trained in bioethics, so "they may not be competent to review risky scientific research or clinical experiments," Zhai said.

He Jiankui is the latest example of insufficient ethics regulation. His controversial experiment to create the world's first gene-edited babies sparked global outrage. Ethics inspection papers from a hospital in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, were forged, according to preliminary investigation results published by local authorities last month.

"An effective ethics regulation should be able to nip unethical experiments in the bud, and it should also have some teeth that can hold serious violators accountable," Zhai said.

However, research ethics is a complex and poorly understood subject that is sometimes overlooked, she said, "Hence ethical training for scientists, officials and the public is essential."

In the association's survey last year, nearly 90 percent of the 12,332 scientists surveyed said they believe unethical practices are deeply harmful. Yet less than a quarter said they would always take research ethics into consideration when designing their experiments.

Only 5 percent of respondents said they knew much about ethics guidelines unrelated to academic honesty, which primarily deals with truthfulness and integrity in their work - meaning that Chinese scientists have poor knowledge of other areas of scientific ethics, such as bioethics, animal rights and environmental impacts.

"Most of our scientists do their research in good faith, but they need to have the necessary theoretical knowledge and regulatory mechanisms to guide them through uncharted ethical territory," Zhai said.

Li Zhenzhen, a science ethics expert and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Science and Development, said China needs ethics agencies whose regulatory capability can keep up with the rapid growth of the country's scientific development.

China is estimated to have spent around 1.95 trillion yuan ($290 billion), or 2.15 percent of its GDP, on research and development last year, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The country also boasted around 4.18 million research personnel last year, the most in the world, it said.

"Legal and ethical regulations can't keep up with the rapid progress China is making in some scientific fields," Li said, adding that genetics, biosciences and artificial intelligence are examples of high-tech fields that sorely need stronger ethics oversight.

Li said insufficient oversight will tarnish China's image in the eyes of the global scientific community, create misunderstandings and mistrust between Chinese and foreign scientists and fuel the stereotype that China's frequent breakthroughs in biosciences are the result of a system in which ethics rules are not holding it back.

"These notions are very detrimental to China's scientific development and international cooperation, especially when many cutting-edge sciences now require global collaboration to advance," she said, adding that enhancing ethical oversight will likely be a hot topic at the upcoming two sessions, the annual meetings of China's top legislative and advisory bodies in early March.

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