Michael Parker, your professor of bioethics and director of the Welcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities
and the Ethos Centre all at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College,
Oxford. Welcome to St Cross College Shorts. It's now about a year since the start of the Kovik 19 pandemic.
Can you describe your everyday research stocks before Kopitar 19?
It's hard to remember before Cauvin, 19 away. It seems such a long time.
But I'll try my best. My son, my background. I'm a philosopher by background and I specialise in ethics.
I'm interested in the ethical issues or ethical aspects of development,
in particular in in in global health and in various new technologies in relation to medicine, particularly genomics and data driven science.
I know I'm one of the things I'm interested in is looking at those issues as they arise in the real world for real people.
So I'm interested in moral problems that arise for, for example,
scientists at the cutting edge of research in genetics, say, or in global health around the world.
Maybe, maybe I have collaborative partnerships with partners in Africa and Southeast Asia.
So what's it like to be a researcher in Ghana engaged in an international collaborative research project?
What are the kind of problems, what are the kinds of things that you worry about from a moral perspective in this kind of network?
That's that's one aspect. And I suppose the other thing, which is a bit more thinking as a as an academic or as a philosopher is I'm interested in.
The ways in which are disciplined, so the disciplines in broadly speaking, in the humanities, her philosophy.
And I'm also interested in history. How are disciplines might need to change?
Might need to be rethought in a way for us to be for them to be adequate to engage
with the kinds of ways in which the world's being changed by neuroscience,
by genomics, by global connectedness, by data science and so on.
So what does it mean for us? What does it mean to do ethics now in the world as it has?
It's as it is currently and changing. And that strikes me that was a really interesting question,
because obviously all of the developments I mentioned raise important questions not only about ethics,
but also about what it means to be what it means to be human and the way I go about it in practise.
My work is I I'm not sort of the usual kind of philosopher, I suppose, in this sense.
I try my best to get to embed my work as closely as I can in the Day-To-Day work of science and medicine.
And that's for two reasons, really. One is that I think that context really matters.
Mean you're trying to understand ethical issues. So. So that's one reason for getting close to the practise.
And the other is I think it's a good place to get kind of early warning in some ways of cutting edge problems and
to be really out at the forefront of of where these difficult moral problems are arising in novel combinations.
So that's that's what I do. So global health and genomics were what I was working on before before I ended up in Kovik mostly.
There's a link there. So how did that change from the pandemic to cold?
Yeah, that's that's an interesting question, too, I think. So one immediate experience was I saw this sort of anecdote, really.
I was sitting in my office. I work in the Big Data Institute, which is up on in Headington and on the Old Road campus.
And I was in my office in a meeting one day with with two of our administrators talking about budgets and to infectious disease.
Researchers started knocking on my door and looking through my glass window in a very
sort of excited way and essentially insisting that I came and spoke to them immediately.
And these were two people. One of them was Professor Krystal Fraser, who's in a group called the Pathogen Dynamics Group in the Big Data Institute.
And they were very excited because they had developed an idea for a mobile phone app which could be used in contact tracing.
And their view was that traditional contacts, these were the early days of COPD, certainly in the.
I'm talking about February. Naturally, their view was that contact tracing, the usual kind of contract tracing, which is, you know,
going around and knocking on people's doors and asking them who they been in contact with was
just gonna be too slow for this new this new disease that was emergency emerging in East Asia,
and that the only way we were going to deal with it and, you know, in a way that was speedy,
sufficiently speedy would be through some sort of digital contact tracing.
So they got an idea of how to do that. And, you know, within kind of an hour of having the thought, they recognised that we're ethical issues.
So they got me involved in that. And I spent quite a lot.
I essentially dropped everything else and worked on that for a for a while and then got more involved in the Kofod
work because of I was approached to be a member of the UK government's scientific advisory group on Emergences Sage.
So my life changed pretty dramatically, possibly a bit earlier than most people in the UK.
So sort of February time really. It sort of started started happening a bit more about how you became a member of SAGE.
So to clarify, it's the UK government's scientific advisory group for emergencies.
Yeah, that's right. So there are two. So I can tell you the story about how I got involved, which I will do.
But there's an interesting question out. Why would someone would approach someone like me?
And I have now that I've got a couple of thoughts about that, but I don't really know.
I for the last 10 years or so, arising out of the kinds of research I mentioned earlier,
I've been working very closely in something called the Hundred Thousand Genomes Project,
which is genomics ing this big initiative by the UK government, by the UK health system,
and some funding from the government to build up genomic tonight, testing in genomic research in the context of the NHS.
So I've been doing that for about 10 years and that's a that's an initiative which does have quite close links with public health and and so on.
So I knew. I knew.
So I know some people in the Department of Health and know some some of the people who are involved in policymaking around science and technology.
So my guess is possibly that maybe one of the reasons I was invited,
the other is I chaired a two year working party working group for the Nuffield Cats on Bioethics,
which led to the publication of a report on the ethical issues in researching global health emergencies in January this year.
So, again, that that that publication date was agreed two years ago, but it turned out to be very timely.
So my guess is that those two things are the reason I was asked.
The way it actually happened was I had a call on my mobile phone on a Sunday afternoon.
I think it was I was sitting.
In my in my in my living room and the phone rang with one of those numbers, and you think, oh, is this gonna be a kind of prankster call or something?
I didn't recognise. And then I answered the phone and it was Patrick.
Sir Patrick Vallance on the other end asking me whether I be essentially this was so I think Sage has been around for a long time.
Sage is a group that responds to emergencies of a range of different kinds.
So the Grenfell Tower disaster, for example, was something that they they they were involved in reporting.
So this was but this was a code version of the coded version, I think had been around since early in the year.
And some big decisions have been made around the initial kind of decisions that lockdown and so on.
And I think they'd recognised early on the ethics was a component that was that had been missing.
I don't know if I'm the first person to be an ethicist to be onstage, but I might.
I think I may well be. So I think they'd recognise the need for some ethics input.
And someone had told them that I wish someone to speak to. So I got this call and agreed.
And then I think I then I was sort of in get up to speed very quickly, sort of, you know, several meetings a week, all, of course, on on on online.
So that's kind of how it happened. But now that's the kind of story, I think, behind why why I was invited.
How do you see the role of the message Sistan Scientific Advisory Group like Sage?
That that is a very good question. So first to this question, what they were expecting of me and I'll see someone else we can answer that question.
I, I, I can't really. But it's the science of, say, Seijas is very much as you say, it's a scientific advisory group.
So it doesn't recommend policy. It doesn't say you should be doing this or that.
It basically says from a scientific perspective, these are a range of consider.
This is a range of considerations that are can be relevant to any decision,
scientific considerations to do with for examples, the levels of infectiousness,
prevalence of the disease in the community,
what people's behaviour looks like now and how what what kind of predictions might be made about future behaviour.
So it's very scientific group and it's advice to government is is is scientific.
So, you know, then the question is, why is it ethicist in that space?
Because so I initially took my my role to be that my role was essentially to advise Sage rather than advising the government.
So I would be saying these are some things that you're talking about as scientists,
which look to me like they have an ethical component to them and to sort of foster a discussion on those topics within those meetings.
And I have to say, I've always been very receptive and we've had some very good discussions.
But actually over time I've managed to find a way of incorporating bits of ethical advice into the advice to governments.
And essentially, I've taken the same approach as the scientists have.
I've tried to highlight where I think there are ethical considerations, considerations that are relevant to policy decisions.
And I've I'm not in a position I mean, it was pretty clear that my role was not to kind of recommend policies, but to say, you know,
here are a couple of policies that you might want to consider and these are the ethical implications of doing one or the other.
These are the things that are relevant considerations to that.
So and so. I sort of see myself as a far partly a raising awareness of ethical issues.
It's partly helping to provide an analysis of those issues and what the what they mean, what what the what the problem is.
And then partly sort of exploring and setting out the implications of of of different competing courses of action.
And of course, ultimately, the decisions and the moral responsibility lies with lies with the parliament or with or with ministers rather than me.
But I felt, you know, there is a sort of moral role for the for me as well as an adviser and obviously for
others to speak up and say this is this is something that I think is a moral problem.
And then it's up to others to decide what they what they do as a result of that advice.
The challenge has been and the opportunity is presented to one of the challenges has been rising.
It's a bit like a dinner party. And if you're studying a dinner party or you're at a dinner party, you're a bit late to arrive.
And everyone sort of standing in groups, talking to each other and in this case are talking about sight, very high tech, scientific, you know,
very sophisticated science that's kind of trying to look for an opportunity to enter into the conversation,
as you would the party, you know, without being pushy.
So one of the challenges at the beginning was to try and identify, listen really, really carefully.
I'm not a scientist. I do have science A-levels. But I but I'm not scientists are trying to listen very carefully and get a sense of the language,
a bit like being a sort of anthropologist, I suppose, and try to get a get a sense of when it when there are questions that that look like the sort
of things I can contribute to and look and what and work out the kind of conventions really.
You know what how how might one speak in these kind of contexts.
So there was a lot of that the beginning and then sort of putting my footing on occasions or speaking when it clearly,
you know, that wasn't the right time. And so I'm sort of getting used to making mistakes.
So that was that was, you know, and that and as I say, everyone's. Been very welcoming and the things I've said have always been taken very seriously.
So I need perhaps have worried as much as I did, but I did see it as a as an experiment in the need for sort of cultural anthropology, really.
I did sort of get it. That's how I approached it. And I think I've made it.
And the opportunity to look, you know, this is there are personal opportunities here, which is,
I think, my experience of Cauvin 19 and the pandemic has been different perhaps to many other people.
Certainly it's the people around me because I'm I'm in the room hearing the decisions.
Hearing the discussion of the evidence and recognising and seeing some of the uncertainties and knowing that, you know, that they exist and so on.
So I think my personal experience has been enhanced, enriched as it whereas a person but also I've been in the room where I've been able
to speak directly to government and to senior scientists and say then and and say,
you know, something about the kind of what I think are important ethical questions.
And, you know, rather than shouting.
NEWSNIGHT on TV, I've actually been able to as I haven't done the shouting, but I've had the opportunity at least to raise these issues and say,
you know, how do you how do you think these might relate to policies, decisions that you're considering?
So that's a privilege, of course, to be asked. You've been involved in the development of the National Health Service, Corbitt contact tracing it.
What was your role in that?
So, as I mentioned earlier, in a way, that's the thing that got me into thinking about covered in it in an academic way at the very beginning.
So I've done I'm doing less of that now. In fact, I'm doing nothing on that, really, apart from my as my as a member sage,
I hear presentations about how the app's going, and I've got a sense of how it's working in the country, as it were.
But I don't do much academically on it. But yeah, in the beginning, in February, I was I was very intensely working on that.
I was working with Crystal Frazer and David Bonfils group while they developed the science.
And I was sitting in rooms with them while they were sort of doing all these interesting calculations about how this app might work and,
you know, very involved in the ethical discussions. And we published a couple of papers.
We published a paper in Science which sort of showed that the digital technology of this kind could make a difference to in the context of a pandemic.
And then we published and I I had the opportunity to write into that paper. Some of the ethical questions that are important I thought were important.
And then we published a paper in another journal which was specifically on the ethics.
And at that point, really, the world kind of changed overnight because I was.
I did multiple interviews for New York Times, BBC, you know, all the various radio.
I was on the Today programme, you know, lots of lots of media interest.
And essentially there was a very interesting discussion which emerged, which I think is is still very interesting,
which is to what extent and when I would we be willing for our current approaches to privacy to to change.
So, you know, and I think I think, you know, we're in the context of a public health emergency.
There's this question which arise out of that. And a solution to the Cambridge 19 pandemic is essentially going to have to be a collective one.
It's about people working together as a society or smaller levels, in particular venues and so on.
That's the only way that the pandemic, certainly when there's no vaccine or treatment,
effective treatments, the only way it can be dealt with is the question about solidarity.
And some of those questions about solidarity are questions about information and data.
And I think there was a lot of interesting discussion, I think, in the early days about about those kind of questions, the limits,
the appropriate limits of privacy within the context of a recognition that we all needed to work together to solve this problem.
And I've and I've done lots of that. I personally think that the mobile phone app was it has worked to some extent in this pandemic.
But really, it's it's the lessons learnt are really more appropriate for future, for the future.
I think it's gonna be really interesting to think about digital technologies and infectious disease in the future,
not only in the UK and around the around the world, for example, in low middle income countries.
I think there's a lot of potential there for thinking about the ethics of that.
Parking is giving us a lot of new knowledge about the role of ethics and in this pandemic.