Abstract
You may or may not be aware that a Dutch private organization is planning to send a manned mission to Mars as a one-way trip, funded in part by a reality TV show covering the selection of the participants, their training and then their experience on Mars. The organization advertised this on the internet, and thousands of volunteers have responded. It is a one-way trip because during the 8 month trip and stay on Mars the participants would lose sufficient muscle mass that they would be unlikely to be able to safely return to life on Earth. It is unknown whether they would be able to survive for the long term on Mars based on present technologies for self-sufficiency, although the company intends to send further colonists and supplies to help support the initial group. 1
What I want to discuss in this editorial is whether this is the sort of thing that ought to be under the purview of research ethics committees – is this experimentation or something else, perhaps ‘pioneering’, which falls outside their remit?
Now whether this sort of activity does receive any scrutiny is largely country dependent – in the US, for example, there would be no requirement for review because as a private organization it would presumably not be receiving federal funding. Likewise in the UK, because it is not research on patients, nor does it involve either tissue or those lacking mental capacity, it would not be formally regulated. As it is not institutionally related to a university it would not be likely to come under informal systems of review either. However, this is somewhat beside the point – I am not as interested in the question of whether this will receive independent ethical scrutiny, but rather whether it ought to.
There is a relatively awkward question about why research warrants the very unusual form of regulation that it receives, and I am inclined to think that many of the standard responses to this question, such as appealing to past harms or the risks involved, are inadequate (Wilson and Hunter, 2010). I am inclined to think that if research ethics review is justified it is because of the epistemic uncertainty involved in research and the normative uncertainty that this generates. Therefore I view research ethics committees as helping researchers discover and fulfil their own moral duties to research participants and others, rather than as regulators. In particular, they help researchers catch themselves when they might be tempted to put the ends of science above the interests of their research participants.
If this view is correct, then the question about whether this sort of activity should be regulated depends on the nature of the risks and the normative picture around them. I suspect there is sufficient uncertainty here both normatively and epistemologically to warrant independent review. In effect, the participants are being asked to give up their current lives forever and to undertake what is a risky experimental journey to a distant, hostile planet. Before this occurs, at the very least we want to ensure that the participants have been given full information, an opportunity to back out and so on. This, I think, warrants regulation.
There is an interesting subsidiary question which I will leave for the reader to consider: if you were a member of a committee reviewing this proposal, how would you decide – ought you to protect the participants from themselves, or allow them to undertake an activity which will in all likelihood shorten their lifespan substantially?