My cousin who is learning ‘Ethics’ in her B.Tech degree had a different view point about killing rats / mice to test new medicines for the sake of humans.  As per her, it is unethical to kill such creatures for our sake.

During the discussion over phone I told her that even though it is legal to do research in other developed countries after getting a degree from a government institute, it is unethical to do so because the degree was almost given free of cost by the government using the tax-payers money and the student is obliged to return some favor to the tax payer (not through money, but through Intellectual Property to the country).

Her argument was that the country doesn’t have proper infrastructure to support research scholars and only developed countries will allow such scholars to do research easily.  Here she had to save even a pencil in the lab.  If that is the case, she was wondering what her focus would be on – research or pencil?

I gave her an example:  “Assume that your father has an IT Research company which trains people for 3 months getting only 10% of the training fees from the student and paying remaining 90% from it’s pocket. Also there is another IT Research company which does similar training but charging 100% of the fee from the student.

After getting 3 months training from your father’s company, if a trainee joins the other rich IT Research company citing the reason that it has more facilities to do research, they pay well, here in your company they have a limit for email storage and there they get unlimited email storage (whether I’ll worry about my research or email storage?), etc, what would you say?”

She told that she had exams the next day and she had to prepare.  Did I hurt her?  Because after getting her degree from a number one government college, she is planning to do research in a developed country.