Ethics in Laboratory Informatics
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
Earlier this week, my monthly newsletter ( http://www.geometrick.com/newsltr_signup.htm ) topic was “Ethics in Laboratory Informatics.” As it happens, I always take a look at the statistics of the newsletter, my blog postings, and any other tools that provide them. Reading these statistics isn’t an exact science, in my opinion, but when you do it long enough, I believe that you do learn about trends and preferences in your readership.
Lo and behold, I learned that more people wanted to read about “Ethics in Laboratory Informatics” than most or maybe any of my other newsletter articles. It could just mean the other topics were truly boring, but I’m hoping it means that people are especially interested in ethics.
In fact, one of the points in my newsletter article was that I’m not convinced our interest in ethics or our ethics, themselves, are necessarily on a downturn. Instead, I believe that the places we express our ethical behavior and learn our ethics continues to change along with everything else.
Sometimes, I run across truly egregious behavior out in our laboratory informatics world. When this happens, I wonder if my standards are too high. I wonder if I’m out-of-touch with the modern world and the latest fashion in behavior. Since I don’t have an office full of co-workers to discuss this with, I sometimes just leave that question unanswered, and continue on to whatever I’m really supposed to be doing (instead of pondering deep questions, I’m probably supposed to be writing some code or creating a test script or something similar).
And then, much much later, I will finally stumble upon a person who brings the subject up to me as something they are interested in and, suddenly, I find out I’m not the only one wondering about these things. In fact, when we all get together and discuss these sorts of things, it’s surprising to know that a large number of people do have these mental ethical discussions with themselves.
One of the reasons I enjoy attending the SmartLabs Exchange so much is that it’s a place where we openly discuss these types of issues. Hopefully, we can use the LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group for that, as well. Meanwhile, if you’ve got these internal dialogues going on, you’re probably not alone -- you just think you are.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/