Conference on Ethics - Summary and Comments on Etienne Verges' Contribution

by Gabriel Synnaeve

First, we will sum-up Étienne Verges' talk on “Ethics for the researcher”, and then we will explain what arethe strengths and the problems of this conception of applying ethics to the world of research.

Verges is a professor of law from Grenoble University and also in a research team working on ethics and law.

Étienne Verges began his speech with scandalous affairs. He mentioned the Hwang affair about false human cloning. He also spoke about the Milhaud and Rylander affairs. He then exposed that the law was insufficient for the regulation of research. The process of legislating about ethics for research is bottom-up and that's why we need to encounter certain cases before being able to treat them. It raises questions like “at which level is it applicable ?”.

The goals of ethics rules and texts are to set scientific integrity conduct. It will empower the credibility of the scientific community and will harmonize ethics with practical aspects of scientific research. In France, the grounds (founding texts) are mainly charters and codes from CNRS, INRA, and Europe but not laws. They focus on the liberty of research, the principles of ethics, responsibilities and the good practices in the field of research.

The spokesman thought that there are reasons that led to neglect or minimize bad conduct effects in France. Particularly the fact that middle and low seriousness problems are not sanctioned by the law, and lawyers must often search for a case law. Another cause is that French research is mainly public and sanctions would limit researcher's liberty and worsen public opinion.


There are plenty of ethics committees in France, but they only make recommendations and rarely condemn scientific acts. This is the point that Étienne Verges seemed to decry in his speech. Actually, he is a lawyer, not a scientist, so it is kind of easy for him to throw rules about without even having to apply them.

It is the main problem of lawyers nowadays : they produce a lot of laws without debating them with experts in the domain. This is exactly what is happening for the Internet and this is why a lot of fiascos like the really recent one with providers filtering wrong sites (denying access to Wikipedia for example) in the United-Kingdoms are happening.

I conclude that ethics must have a more fixed frame in order to counter unhappy cases that actually happen, but this frame should be appointed by both scientists and lawyers if it is to be in the law. It should also be re-worked on a regular basis as this laws should, more than others, evolve with the progress of science.

Gabriel Synnaeve is a third year student at ENSIMAG