2016, Vol.17, No.1

Journal of the Korea Bioethics Association 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.55

pISSN : 1598-0324
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kba

Recently in the fields of science and technology policy studies and innovation studies, the concept of “responsible research and innovation (RRI)” gained its visibility. Being mainly discussed in European Union and in the United States, responsible research and innovation (RRI) is researched academically and also being practiced in policy-making processes. In this paper, I show that the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI) may have its origins in the field of bioethics. Since later decades of the last century, there were many discussions about how science and technology research should be conducted ethically while being socially-aware. Here I analyze three foreign case studies to bolster this argument. First case study: Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the U.K. periodically publishes reports on bioethics. Some of the reports explicitly deal with the concept of RRI. Second case study: U.K. Medical Research Council (MRC) published Good Research Practice (GRP). I show that the concept of GRP is connected with the concept of RRI. Third case study: United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) published a code of conduct called Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). By showing that RCR also explicitly requires RRI-related responsibilities from its NSF awardees, I show that these three bioethical origins are interconnected and intertwined with the concept of RRI.

This article aims at inquiring ethical issues required for reviewing Social Behavioral Research(SBR) to establish stably Institutional Review Boards(IRB) instituted within universities based on the entirely revised Bioethics and Safety Act. Unlike the existing review criteria of IRB focusing invasive researches, SBR necessitates more careful approach in three aspects: ‘interests of participants’, ‘interpersonal relationships between researcher and participants’, and ‘social values of SBR’. In addition, ‘privacy and confidentiality’ and ‘informed consent and deception’ can be critically considered for assessing risk and benefit analysis on SBR. Accordingly, this article seeks reviewing such characteristics of SBR and ethical issues within important components required for conducting a research. In particular, the article addresses ethical issues including ‘public exposure of participant’, ‘reduced control over self-presentation of participant’, and ‘reduction of participant’s private space’ with regard to task to ensure ‘privacy and confidentiality’ and examines those of ‘impaired capacity for decision-making’, ‘deprivation of respect’, and ‘erosion of trust’. Besides, the article examines how these ethical issues have revealed through the case of Laud Humphreys’ Study, a typical example of SBR, and makes suggestions for alternatives to those issues.

The age of gene therapy is down the pike with the arrival of CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme scissors. Gene therapy on embryos can cause positive socio-economical impact in that it can break the cycle of genetic disorder. But there are various social and ethical issues, including using embryo for experiment, technological limitation, limit of knowledge about the function of genes, absent of consent by descendants, and using for genetic enhancement. For this reason, the reproductive use of edited embryos is prohibited in many countries. But scientific research are generally permitted considering the potential effectiveness. A regulatory framework for the age of gene therapy is also being discussed. But Korean law is ambiguous about whether scientific research for gene therapy on human embryo is permitted and there is no regulation for human embryos gene alteration. So scientific research for gene therapy on human embryo need to be permitted within reasonable limits, and human embryos gene alteration for reproductive purposes should be prohibited. And in human embryo gene therapy era, new regulations are necessary including technical and ethical limitation on therapy, multi generational follow-up for safety, access to therapy regardless of their economic power, and the prohibition of compulsory gene therapy.