Center for Ethics of Science and Technology

About the CEST

Today's world is one in which science and technology play an essential role in almost every aspect of life. Almost all the changes that are taking place are due to advances in science and technology, as can be seen in the emergence of the internet, which enable information to explode exponentially in the past few years, and biotechnology, which has made such scenarios as human cloning and genetic manipulation of organisms an everyday reality.

These advances naturally create a whole set of problems that have hitherto been non-existent just a few years ago. For example, who would have thought that the internet would have grown so fast and has become so pervasive in virtually all aspects of life, so much so that it has well become lifeblood of humans' communicative activities and has the potential of 'taking over' the real world and to replace it with its own world where everything, both real and unreal, is 'indexed' (or 'googled') and has value tagged on. A clear problem is the digital divide between those who enjoy the benefits brought about by the technology, and those who are left behind. Another, well known problem is how privacy of citizens are going to be protected when every corner of reality has become item in the manipulable and calculable "information reality" (Borgmann 1999).

Furthermore, another important aspect of today's advance in technology is evident in biotechnology. The success of cloning mammals on the one hand is a first step in research on new ways of treating hitherto intractable diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease through culturing of stem cells. But on the other hand, it is well known that the possibility of getting fertilized cells of potential human beings and manipulate them to serve the needs of patients is ethically problematic. The world is now engaged in a series of wide ranging debates on the moral of stem cell research. Moreover, genetic manipulation technology has also created no less heated controversies, as plants and animals are now malleable to the needs or perhaps desires of human beings. Many very difficult problems, ones not confined to the technical nature of these advances alone, lie ahead.

These advances, in addition, are pertinent not only to the developed Western world, but the developing world such as Thailand has inevitably felt the impact created by these rapid advances. The spread of the Internet to the developing world has prompted many to say that there are overt or covert attempts to 'colonize the consciousness' of the population in the developing world (Hershock 1999), where the thinking and beliefs of the latter are manipulated through the information technology by those in the developed world. The spread of biotechnology has also created the same type of problems.

In order to contribute to the attempts to find solutions to all these difficult problems, the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology has been established at Chulalongkorn University to help solve these problems. It also acts as a focal point in the region and aims at becoming a center of excellence in the area too.

Objectives

• Conduct research on various aspects of ethics of science and technology, most notably those related to information technology and biotechnology, as well as the relation between science and society.
• Act as a focal point on the attempts to understand how science and technology interact with society and culture, especially in South-east Asian context.
• Disseminate knowledge and perform outreaching programs to be general public.