A description of a course on chemical safety and scientific ethics is presented. The goals of this course are to impress upon the students the importance of safety in their professional lives; to empower the students to take charge of their own personal safety when working with chemicals; to illustrate and emphasize the vital importance of honesty and integrity within the scientific enterprise; and to explore issues of honesty and integrity through case studies that allow ethical decisions to be critically examined. The recent approaches and activities used to accomplish these goals are detailed. These include readings from chemical safety textbooks, chemical safety reports from news sources, and group discussions springing from problems in scientific ethics.
Supplement
The supplementary material is a Microsoft Word for Windows 97 document containing a more detailed version of the article. Two new sections titled "Wasting Away Again...A Student-Authored Scientific Ethics Case Study" and "Student-Authored Case Study Evaluation" are included. It has been compressed into zip (for Windows) and sit (for Macintosh) files. It is also available as a pdf, accessible with Acrobat Reader.
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