The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) have announced they are embarking on a new ambitious 5-year strategy, one that will see them working to place ethics at the heart of decisions regarding biomedicine and health, so we all benefit.
This is an aim that links seamlessly with the motivations of our “Ethics & Expertise” project in partnership with the NCOB. Within the project we will be mapping who ethics experts are and trying to better understand the barriers to how governments can access and follow the ethical advice available to them. We will then use these insights to develop a policy toolkit that will support policymakers in addressing ethical issues. We will apply new learning from our international comparative cases in Germany and Australia on what works, where and why.
By attending the launch event of the NCOB’s new strategy, we got to hear first-hand from an array of interesting speakers with expertise across the ethics, political and health protection space.
Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley, incoming Chair of the NCOB emphasised the importance of utilising ethics as a way to shape futures rather than merely describing them. She also highlighted the need to provide rigorous ethical analysis in a clear and relevant way to decision-makers, underscoring the benefits for cross-cutting collaboration in key issues.
NCOB’s Director, Danielle Hamm, advocated for the relevance of ethics in public life and acknowledged the importance of an inclusive perspective to ethics in policy making. She spoke about the need to better anticipate potential opportunities and ethical risks through strengthened horizon scanning methodologies, and she called for a diversification in how ethical advice is published and presented, saying that this is how we will best meet the needs of key decision makers and so boost impact.
Professor Jeffrey Kahn, Director of the Berman Institute in America, started his address by noting that there is no standing body on bioethics in the US. Instead, each serving president traditionally appoints a national bioethics commission. However, there has not been one since Barak Obama’s presidency, which means, in Kahn’s view, that there is a pronounced need of ethical expertise in the American public sector as part of its responses to public health and bioethics crises. Professor’s Kahn’s remarks echoed a recent contribution to Science that highlighted the absence of ethical analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) public consultation and strategies for developing One Health zoonotic and pandemic public health preparedness. This context highlighted not only differences in ethical advisory landscapes in the UK and the US, but also a need for independent and government agencies to influence policy from a bioethics perspective.
The fourth speaker, Dame Professor Jenny Harries, CEO of the UK Health Security Agency, provided us with some real and fascinating insight into how ethics is currently considered and viewed by UK Government officials. Overall, Harries discussed the importance of openness and transparency in monitoring health outcomes and the need to ground scientific interventions in high-quality data trusted by communities. Yet Harries also noted the challenges of working with imperfect science and incomplete data during times of crises. In this context, she suggested, ethical consultation and advice are pivotal.
After the individual speeches, Fiona Fox, CEO of the Science Media Centre, invited everyone back onto stage for a panel discussion. Despite audience questions about the public’s scepticism towards science, the panel struck an optimistic note. Panellists agreed that people generally trust science. This is evident in the high vaccination rates (around 70%) among young families in the UK. They noted the role scientific expertise can play in engaging the public in learning and developing a wider public debate. The discussion emphasised ways to make ethics matter in public life and recognised the significance of ethical expertise. Danielle Hamm highlighted the value that ethicists bring, providing essential tools and frameworks for decision-making, and Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley noted in closing remarks that it is always helpful to have ethicists in the room.
NCOB’s “Making Ethics Matter” strategy marks an ambitious move in the area of bioethics and ethical expertise. Similarly, our “Ethics & Expertise” project aims to ensure policymakers are aware of ethical issues and have the tools to address ethical questions when making policy decisions. We look forward to collaborating with NCOB over the next two years to advance new understandings of how ethical advice systems are organised and how they can function better in the future.