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Ethical research — the long and bumpy road from shirked to shared

From all too scarce, to professionalized, the ethics of research is now everybody’s business, argues Sarah Franklin in the sixth essay in a series on how the past 150 years have shaped science, marking Nature’s anniversary.
  1. Sarah Franklin

    1. Sarah Franklin is chair of sociology and director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge, UK.

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Illustration by Señor Salme

In the autumn of 1869, Charles Darwin was hard at work revising the fifth edition of On The Origin of Species and drafting his next book, The Descent of Man, to be published in 1871. As he finished chapters, Darwin sent them to his daughter, Henrietta, to edit — hoping she could help to head off the hostile responses to his debut, including objections to the implication that morality and ethics could have no basis in nature, because nature had no purpose.

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Nature 574, 627-630 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03270-4

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