This story was published in print in February 2024.
Traditional high school STEM classes push students to solve problems from a quantitative angle, memorizing concepts and applying formulas to search for objectively correct answers. Even AP STEM curricula emphasize learning as much material as possible for the end-of-year exam, often rushing through content and leaving little room for reflection. Students finish STEM courses with a comprehensive theoretical knowledge of the subject matter but without an understanding of real-world applications and consequences.
In the workplace, STEM professionals pursue projects to improve people’s everyday lives, striving to solve problems like food shortages, climate change and deadly diseases; however, not all developments in STEM contribute to the betterment of humanity. In the wake of recent technological and scientific advances, ethical problem-solving has proven to be just as important as factual knowledge and quantitative reasoning in STEM fields.
STEM curriculum writers and school system officials must acknowledge the importance of ethics in STEM education and mandate lessons in STEM ethics to teach future generations to make thoughtful, educated decisions about scientific developments and their impacts.
Ethical considerations are critical to some of the most popular and lucrative STEM subjects. Technological advancements and increased social media usage have created new job opportunities in computer science, especially in the media sector.
Companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google have expanded the scope of artificial intelligence. Tech conglomerates like Meta, which owns and operates popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, profit from complex algorithms and massive banks of consumer data. Social media companies employ AI tools to attract users and keep them hooked on media platforms, generating more revenue at the risk of endangering consumers’ well-being. According to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, media algorithms cause user behaviors that can lead to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts and other harmful mental health effects, especially for children and teens. The tendency to prioritize engagement and profit over consumer health is a dangerous pattern that educators must address early.
As AI technology rapidly advances and becomes widely accessible, tech experts and consumers continue to voice concerns about potential ethical ramifications. Many experts say that AI — especially the hypothetical system of Artificial General Intelligence, which could replicate any human task and essentially mimic the thinking of a human being — could present an existential threat to humankind. This past May, a group of scientists and tech industry leaders, including former CEO of Microsoft Bill Gates and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, signed a statement with the Center for AI Safety warning the public about the possibility of AI taking control of humanity if technology industry and political leaders don’t limit its use.
As AI tools become more prevalent in the workplace and classroom, students should learn to think about AI through a critical lens in order to make responsible decisions regarding the advancement of technology. Today’s students will be the very thinkers and leaders who determine whether humans will control AI or whether AI will control humanity.
Ethical principles also govern the work of engineers, as they must consider how their projects will impact the environment and local communities. The operational decisions of oil and gas facilities can cause harm to ecosystems. The process of creating infrastructure like buildings, bridges and dams can disproportionately affect low-income and indigenous communities and may cause dangerous accidents — facts that engineers must consider as part of the design and planning process.
Pharmaceutical companies also wield tremendous power over society by controlling drug prices, drug distribution, clinical testing, animal testing and other consequential research and resource allocation. In 2018, one unit of insulin cost $98.70 in the U.S., compared with an average of $8.81 in 32 other countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has since reduced the price of insulin by over half, but prices in the U.S. are still well above the global average, demonstrating the dominance of private-sector interest over ethical concerns.
The extreme prices of some pharmaceutical drugs, coupled with expensive hospital bills and finite access to quality healthcare, weigh heavily on families across the country who are already dealing with the emotional weight of illness and injury.
Furthermore, the pharmaceutical industry has had a history of testing drugs on people without their consent, particularly people of color. Discriminatory and unethical studies, such as the infamous 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study on Black American men, harm public trust in the government and medical professionals for generations.
Informed consent and equitable treatment of study subjects should be the top priority for any clinical trial, making medical research ethics an important concept for students planning to enter the field.
Similarly, the fields of biology and genetics wrestle with ethical dilemmas related to revolutionary work in cloning, genetic testing, gene editing and GMOs.
CRISPR is a new technology that researchers are already using to modify the DNA of living organisms. While CRISPR technology has existed for decades, it has recently advanced to a point where it may be possible to create “designer babies,” babies born with genetically edited traits that their parents specifically select. Scientists are now capable of creating humans who are supposedly genetically superior to others, editing out the diversities that make the human gene pool unique.
The moral issues that accompany advancements in biology are just as important to consider as the technical aspects, yet courses designed to prepare students for biology-related careers rarely discuss bioethics adequately.
Biology teacher Daniel Prettyman believes STEM curricula should allow for more discussion of ethics. When he taught Molecular Biology, Prettyman dedicated a unit to bioethics. The unit required students to discuss realistic scenarios, putting themselves in the place of biologists presented with ethical dilemmas. Prettyman hopes STEM ethics education will lead to a greater understanding of the moral implications of specific biotechnologies.
“Most people accept that we should be using this stuff for the betterment of humanity, but people disagree on what that means,” Prettyman said. “The overarching theme in bioethics is that we have the ability to do a lot of things now, but should we be able to do them?”
Most large technology, engineering and biomedical companies continue to answer this question for us. These companies are hierarchically organized and focused primarily on profit, often at the expense of ethical responsibility. According to a fellowship publication from the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society, STEM-related companies often value short-term rewards or punishments above ethical integrity.
The paper describes how many large tech companies use “stack ranking” methods — sorting employees based on their performance to increase productivity. Managers at Meta, for example, grade and rank their employees and dismiss the bottom 15% at the end of each biannual review. To maintain a high ranking, employees often avoid giving their superiors critical feedback on company projects or challenging unethical decisions.
Ethics-centered STEM education could help decrease the prevalence of questionable company practices in STEM fields by equipping future workers with a stronger moral foundation to carry with them throughout their careers. Applying an ethical framework to STEM studies would encourage students to seek solutions based on creating positive change in their workplaces and communities, rather than short-term monetary rewards.
The right curricular resources are already available. The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research provides a resource packet for teachers containing classroom activities and ethical dilemmas for discussion. The hypothetical scenarios force students to examine their ethical decision-making process and apply it to real-world cases in the STEM world — medical triaging, physician-assisted suicide and inequities in health care, among dozens of others. Students better understand the relevance of school lessons when they learn in a real-world context, increasing their ethical awareness and overall interest in the subject.
For AP STEM course teachers tasked with teaching as much content as possible before the end-of-year exam, finding time to discuss ethics properly can be challenging. Throughout the year, teachers can integrate short discussions or brief written questions about the real-world impact of the current topic into their lessons. AP teachers can also delve deeper into STEM-related ethics during the weeks after the exam in May. It is imperative, however, that teachers encourage analytical thinking and deep reflection in these discussions.
Beyond high school, institutions of higher education provide courses in STEM ethics, but these courses are often optional for STEM students, meaning this vital material only reaches a small portion of the student body. All students should learn how to think critically about ethics early on in their STEM education to build the foundation for discussing more complex ethical topics in higher education.
Training the next generation of professionals in STEM fields is critical to the planet’s future. As the world becomes infinitely more complicated with the invention and growth of futuristic technologies such as AI, CRISPR and virtual reality, it is more important than ever that schools train a generation of compassionate, ethically-minded individuals.
