Research Projects

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The effects of climate change—in particular rising surface temperatures, rising sea levels, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events—have serious, long-term, and in some cases irreversible consequences for people, animals, and plants. A broad societal discourse on how to address climate change requires a scientific foundation that not only addresses ethical challenges and legal instruments but also examines the nature of our economic activities and our relationship with nature.

The goal of PRACC is to develop an ethical and legal framework for society’s appropriate response to the consequences of climate change, grounded in the fundamental concepts of intergenerational justice and freedom. This framework is then intended to serve as a basis for, on the one hand, designing adjustments to production processes and consumer behavior informed by bioeconomic analyses, and, on the other hand, providing analyses for nature conservation measures in light of the loss of biodiversity caused by climate change.

Link to the website: https://www.pracc.de/

You can also find our PRACC project on Instagram.

Animal Models – Selection Criteria in Ethical and Legal Perspective

AniMotion is a BMBF-funded, interdisciplinary project conducted in collaboration between the University of Bonn and the coordinating institution, TiHo Hannover. The project encompasses the fields of ethics and philosophy (Prof. Dr. Peter Kunzmann, TiHo), laboratory animal science (Prof. Dr. Bernhard Hiebl, TiHo), infection research (Prof. Dr. Maren von Köckritz-Blickwede, TiHo), and law (Prof. Dr. Dr. Tade Spranger, University of Bonn).

AniMotion addresses the question with a truly interdisciplinary concept that not only unites the scientific disciplines but also intertwines them across three levels. At the first level, the respective perspectives on the selection of model animals are first clarified using the relevant discipline-specific criteria. On a second level, issues are addressed that require two scientific disciplines (e.g., the relevance of the 3R principle between law and laboratory animal science; the question of subjective burden on the actors between ethics and research practice). The goal is to arrive at a coherent set of criteria on the third level that is consistent across all perspectives.

Public discourse is largely dominated by the question of the legitimacy of animal experimentation in general. Questions regarding the “details” of specific experimental projects are discussed less frequently, even though real conflicts arise precisely over the conditions of specific projects. Given the large number of laboratory animals, it is legitimate and indeed imperative to ask not only whether we conduct (or allow) experiments, but also what kind of experiments these are.

Among the important and often contentious questions in such discussions is: Which animals are used for which experiments?

Researchers, authorities, legislators, and ethicists have their own ideas about how this selection should be made and (ideally) on what principles it can be based. The question arises as to how consistently this selection is made from the perspective of the individual stakeholders, and how scientific, legal, and ethical arguments can be synthesized into a coherent decision-making framework. The project aims to develop a concept that synthesizes various disciplinary approaches while preserving their respective strengths and simultaneously integrates them into a model capable of serving as the basis for a form of rational consensus.

Beyond Performance: An Ethical Framework for the Use of AI in Neuromedicine

The scientific and political communities agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most transformative forces of our time. It is widely recognized that there is an urgent need for appropriate means to oversee and regulate these transformative forces. A particularly important area is medicine, as the use of AI here will directly impact the lives of each and every one of us. The overarching goal of this project is to provide a theoretically grounded and empirically validated framework for evaluating the use of AI-based methods in medical diagnostics and decision-making. Neuromedicine serves as the relevant use case here. Detailed ethical and legal analyses will be conducted to identify necessary conceptual revisions. Qualitative empirical methods will be used to first explore factors influencing acceptance and trust in relation to AI-based procedures in neuromedicine. Subsequently, two large-scale standardized surveys will be conducted to quantitatively assess the impact of various influencing factors on the acceptance of AI innovations in neuromedicine. The results of these investigations form the basis for the development of an evaluation framework for medical AI that is ethically and legally sound and takes into account the expectations of those directly affected by the use of this novel technology.

The legal subproject will be the first to address these issues in both breadth and depth, with a particular focus on the question of how current case law might be extrapolated.

The research consortium consists of:

Bert Heinrichs, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine – Ethics in the Neurosciences (INM-8), Forschungszentrum Jülich (project coordinator)
Dirk Lanzerath, German Reference Center for Ethics in the Life Sciences, University of Bonn
Robert Langner, Institute for Systemic Neuroscience, University Hospital Düsseldorf
Julian Caspers, Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital Düsseldorf
Simon Eickhoff, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine – Brain and Behavior (INM-7), Forschungszentrum Jülich
Prof. Dr. Dr. Tade M. Spranger, Centre for the Law of Life Sciences, University of Bonn

The project is funded by the BMBF under grant number 01GP2113B and runs from December 1, 2021, to November 30, 2024.

Link to the website: https://www.fraim-projekt.de/