American Science: Ethical Conflicts and Political Choices
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course tracing how American scientists have navigated political pressure and ethical dilemmas from the Manhattan Project through today's biotechnology debates. Topics include the development of nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cold War science policy, the space shuttle disasters, debates over nuclear power and biofuels, historical abuses of human subjects in psychological experiments, and controversies over genetically modified food, the human genome project, and embryonic stem cell research. The course also considers the ethics of archaeological science amid disputes over museum collections. Materials include the syllabus, readings, and assignments used in the MIT classroom, asking students not just to analyze past scientists' choices but to consider how they themselves would act facing the same dilemmas. No certificate is offered, but all course materials are free to access under MIT's open license.