STAT1201 Ethics Review Essay Guidelines The goal of the ethics review is for you to demonstrate your grasp of some of the ethical issues and challenges involved in scientific studies that we covered in the ethics lectures and workshops, and for you to demonstrate your ability to write clearly, precisely and concisely. The maximum essay size is 500 words, excepting only bibliographic content (citations and bibliography). Your word count will be checked automatically and you will be penalized or failed if your essay is too long. We understand that for many of you this will be the first essay with ethical analysis that you have written. Given this, we have endeavored to make the requirements for this essay and the marking criteria as clear as possible. It is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with these criteria and requirements and to submit an essay that meets the stated standards. If you are unsure about any of the criteria and requirements then it is essential to ask for clarification in your workshops. It is a good idea to choose a study involving human or animal subjects. Experimental studies are an obvious choice but observational studies with human subjects are also fine. Retrospective studies (re-analysing existing data) or meta-analyses (studies which only collate and analyse the data from other studies) should be avoided as they rarely involve interesting ethical issues Essay Topic Your task is to write a philosophy essay about the most interesting or pressing ethical matters relating to your chosen article. Your essay should answer one or more of the following questions about the scientific article you have chosen as the subject of your review assessment items: Q1. Are there any specific ethical issues raised by this particular study? If so, briefly describe one or two of them and what you think is the right response to them. (For example the study might relate to chemical or biological weapons, abortion, genetic engineering, cloning or some other significant ethical issue, or the study might have been designed or conducted incompetently or unethically). Q2. Are there human experimental subjects in the study? Was the experimentation upon them ethical? Can you tell whether they gave informed consent to their participation in the study and was such consent sufficient? Give reasons for your answer. Q3. Were there animals used in the study? Can you tell whether they were treated humanely? If they suffered at all or died do you think the benefits of the study were sufficient to justify their use? Give reasons for your answer. Q4. What incentives, if any, might the researcher(s) who conducted this particular study have had to falsify or manipulate their results? If the researcher(s) conducting this particular study had chosen to falsify, manipulate and/or misrepresent their data, explain briefly the methods of manipulating the experimental design and/or the data that might be used for this purpose and why you think it would be wrong to do so. Note that Q1, Q2 and Q3 are asking you to ethically assess