Although the original target audience for our course was graduate students in biomedical sciences, we
drew students from psychology, engineering, chemistry, and earth science. Students in different
disciplines had different levels of interest for different topic areas. Students in psychology wanted more
concentration on human experimentation; those in engineering wanted less. Students in engineering
wanted more attention paid to business and commercial complications faced by scientists; those in
psychology for the most part did not. Courses can be designed to focus greater or lesser attention on
different content areas to serve different target audiences. Nevertheless, we do believe that a survey of
certain major and essential content areas is an important part of each scientist’s education. We see our
course as a survey course that had the function of beginning the process of ethics education.
The disagreement between students from different disciplines about what ought to receive primary
attention in the course was offset by the value of students coming to understand how conventions among
scientific disciplines differ. While we initiated the faculty seminar to develop a teaching team and to
practice thinking together about these issues, we discovered in the process of running both a University
Seminar and a graduate course that the faculty were often more engaged in discussion of these issues than
were the students. For this we credit the role of experience. Faculty with years of research behind them
had endless stories and mishaps to relate. Some faculty also found themselves defending actions that
students dismissed offhand as morally prohibited. Students tended to be somewhat idealistic and
unrealistic about the pressures and the temptations to which they might someday succumb. As we
discuss in Section 4, we believe that faculty seminars are central training grounds for faculty involvement
in ethics education.