The World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet are the cutting edge communication environments for engineering and science, and are fast becoming the environment of choice for education innovators in other disciplines as well. This project will construct on the WWW an Ethics Center for Science and Engineering. The center will serve as a model web ethics center, demonstrating the potential of the web to bring together a variety of existing materials and make them available to a diverse population of users. The subject matter will include research ethics, professional ethics for engineers and scientists, and policy questions that bear on research ethics and professional ethics, including questions of research ethics which arise in medical research. The WWW Ethics Center will serve students, practitioners, researchers, and science and engineering instructors, as well as scholars in science and engineering ethics. The Center will provide support for developing responses to ethical problems; information and informed reflection on the ethical issues that commonly arise in engineering and science; access to educational resources in science and engineering ethics; and a forum for educators to disseminate their educational innovations.
