Polish academy is to establish a national commission on research ethics

The Polish Academy of Sciences has taken steps to establish a national commission for research ethics, which will make Poland among the first countries in eastern Europe to have such a commission and one of only a handful in the European Union.

The academy received the mandate to found the ethics commission from Poland’s parliament, which last autumn adopted a package of new laws aimed at improving Polish science, said Andrzej Górski, a former president of the University of Warsaw Medical School who is now a vice president at the academy.

In addition to laws dealing with funding of research projects and of research institutes, the parliament also adopted a law updating the regulation …