Research and Ethics of Research

Many people from academic background and non academic background are arguing about the story of the world's first gene-edited babies, and it is normal to see that people disagree with each other and have different views over this issue. Even some scholars in the field have contradicted opinions about this 'experiment' (it is an experiment for He Jiankui and his colleagues, but I can‘t see it purely as an experiment since it will affect two lively human beings).

Scientists and scholars from other fields are conducting experiments which involve human participants to find out the answers to their valuable questions; however, when conducting experiments, scholars are supposed to follow ethic codes. I am not a researcher in natural science; however, I still need to follow certain ethic codes if I want to conduct experiments in my field. I am currently researching about networking, which seems a very harmless topic; however, according to the codes, I need to let participants know the experiments (including potential risks and harm, even some very minor risk), and I also need to appreciate the time they spend on my study (in some cases, I should pay for their participation). The most difficult part is to let participants know the experiment. It involves two main issues. The issue is the impact of providing information on experiment results, the other issue is unknown information asymmetry and unknown knowledge.

If I conduct an experiment to study humans' behaviour (irrationality), and I tell my experiment's purpose to my participants, because people tend to be rational, they will try to guess how they should react to the experiment in order to make themselves look rational; under such circumstance, the outcome of the experiment will not reflect people's true behaviour. Secondly, of course, we need to inform our participants about all the potential risk and harm; however, we do not necessarily know all information, and the impacts on different people can be different, but we may not know that.

Despite the existing difficulties, researches should always follow the ethic codes.