Book review

Ethics for Life Scientists

Edited by Michiel Korthals and Robert J Bogers

236 pp. Springer, 2004 / Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005; ISBN 1-4020-3179-3  (paperback), £32.00

I was pleased when two different journals asked me to review this book. It sounded as if it would be a good resource for me and for my students. However, reading it was a somewhat disappointing experience.

Firstly, the writing style and accessibility of the material vary somewhat from chapter to chapter (perhaps inevitable in a multi-author volume). Many of the chapters are in pairs, with the first of the pair (e.g. 7a) being a substantial paper and the second (e.g. 7b) being a reply to and / or comment on the first, this structure reflecting the origin of the book as the published proceedings of a workshop (held at Wageningen, Netherlands in May 2003). Overall, it is a dense and intense text with a small font size that packs a lot of material into the 219 pages of actual text. If we consider a readability scale running from 1 to 4 where 1 means 'very readable: can be read on the beach' and 4 means 'tough going: needs silence, freedom from distractions and total concentration', this is a book that I mostly grade at levels 3 or 4, with the occasional chapter at level 2. Just because a book is about a serious subject does not mean that it should necessarily be hard to read. I have enjoyed several serious and even weighty books on science and on ethics which were very readable and accessible. Unfortunately, Ethics for Life Scientists falls short of this standard.

Secondly, the content does not match 'what it says on the tin'. In the last chapter, Michiel Kortals writes: Life sciences concentrate on life and death; this simple statement stands for most of the urgent ethical problems these sciences are confronted with. ...The life sciences cannot escape from ethical issues, controversies, dilemmas even ... In this collection of papers we have intensively discussed the new and often uncertain aspects of these sciences and their connected technologies, as well as their wider (global) impact. This statement suggests that the book is about what we often call bioethics, namely the ethical issues arising from biomedical science. Although some of these issues are indeed discussed, the book is much more about the wider issues of general professional ethics and with more generic science-ethics issues. For the reader who is prepared to work at it, there is some interesting and, in places, challenging material here. This includes discussion of the relationship between professional ethics and 'common morality', of the place of science in 21st century society and of the 'accountability culture.' The latter, it is proposed, is more likely to breed suspicion than trust. However, despite these features, I did not find the book as a whole helpful or interesting.

Thirdly, there are a few errors of fact, most of which are fortunately not misleading in terms of the material presented in the book. One example (on page 163) is attribution of the discovery of DNA to Watson and Crick. They did not discover DNA (Friedrich Miescher did so in 1869) but elucidated its structure. This error is often read or heard in the media but should surely have been edited out of this book.

Overall, I suggest that this is more a book for professional ethicists and moral philosophers who are interested in the life sciences rather than life scientists who are interested in ethics (as perhaps we all should be). This is not a book that most of our readers will need to rush out and buy although I shall have occasional reason to dip into my copy.

Reviewed by John Bryant

School of Biosciences
University of Exeter
Geoffrey Pope Building
Stocker Road
Exeter
EX4 4QD
UK

j.a.bryant@exeter.ac.uk

Declaration of interest: My own book Introduction to Bioethics (Bryant, J., Baggott la Velle, L. and Searle, J., John Wiley and Sons, 2005) was published recently. However, I do not regard it as a rival or competitor to Ethics for Life Scientists. The two books are of different genres and are aimed at different readerships.