Question: To what extent should science be controlled and restricted?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Ooh, big topic. This is a very difficult question. I really firmly believe that science should be about finding out more about the world, aside from whether it’s justifiable for medical/environmental application. So, on the surface there might be a lot of research – maybe including mine – which doesn’t immediately seem like it’s going to help people or the planet. However, we don’t know when surgeons will have the technology to reach into an injured brain and fix it, and so you could say that all of the work currently done in neuroscience is building up an evidence base for that time… And this idea applies to lots of other areas of research.

Of course, there are occasions where ethical considerations have to be weighed up. I think it’s easy to say that testing animals to develop new perfumes/cosmetics is something that potentially causes unnecessary injury and distress to animals. However, it’s harder to say whether we should not perform experiments on animals for application in human medical research. When scientists make applications for funding and ethical approval, their applications are often assessed by a group of ‘lay people’ from all sorts of fields, so that there already public input into which research is most worthy of resources and important for the progression of the field. I think a solid level of communication between scientists and everyone else is important in working out these issues.