Background

The University of Delaware has made significant progress over the past several years in five areas that define academic performance – Excellent Faculty, Successful Students, High Quality Affordable Education, Superior Research and Service and Outstanding Facilities. As a result of this transformation the concept of a ‘New University of Delaware’ has emerged; one with greater institutional strength in virtually every area and one that embodies a much higher standard of academic performance.

One component of Superior Research is an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary and collaborative research, both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. One aspect of this that has been explored little, but promises much, is the engagement of the social, physical and biological sciences in real time conversations regarding issues of ethics and policy arising from the immensity of the advances in the physical and biological sciences. For example, issues that arise from the consideration of reproductive and therapeutic cloning, from the genetic modification of food, from the patenting of genetic material, from research data manipulation and from conflicts of interest between graduate students and professors. It is possible today to explore the ethical, legal and social implications of a scientific revolution as it is happening.

To explore this opportunity, the University of Delaware has allocated seed funds to build support for an ethics and public policy initiative at the University, that will bring together students and faculty in the social sciences with their counterparts in the physical and biological sciences, to provide forums and frameworks to deliberate the social value of scientific advances.

Such an initiative would also meet a statewide need and opportunity. Accordingly, the Delaware EPSCoR proposal contains funding to develop an interface with the University program, extend it to the other academic institutions in the State and thereby provide a resource for the Delaware public and their legislative and private sector components. The EPSCoR funds will be used to help establish a leadership team, with broad representation, whose role will be to design and execute an ethics and public policy program, statewide. The program will encourage and sponsor faculty and student research on various dimensions of ethics and public policy, sponsor statewide forums on important policy issues involving the ethical dimensions of advances in physical and biological sciences, collaborate with medical and other institutions on professional training programs that focus on ethics and public policy and serve as a point of dissemination for information and research on ethics and public policy. The goal of the leadership team will be to create a program of quality and relevance so that it can be transitioned to a ‘center’ able to achieve sustainability from income obtained from federal grants, foundations and private/public sector collaborations.