EMU's Ethos Week 'Best Practices' Award

Originally submitted by: jadelay

In doing a quick search of some of the previous events featured at EMU's upcoming Ethos Week (please check out the website for the March 10-14 event:http://www.cob.emich.edu), I noticed that one of the awards given at the end of the week recognizes "an individual considered to have a strong ethical orientation in his/her business dealings." And in an email sent to me by the Ethos Week coordinator and the Director of the EMU Merlanti Business Ethics Initiative, Professor John Waltman suggested that a2ethics.org members might be interested in nominating a businessperson who meets the criteria for the award. It may still be possible to submit your best mentor or that person you think best fits the above description. (Again the website is your best bet for additional information on this award: http://www.emich.edu/public/cob/management/ethics/award.html ). One "Best Practices" Award honoree particularly sparked my attention. Howard Cash, the founder of Gene Codes Corporation in Ann Arbor, received the award in 2005. Among the private company's products is software for forensic DNA sequence assembly and analysis, used in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and in the wake of the South Asian tsunami in 2004. Because a2ethics.org has just sponsored a panel discussion involving the issue of disaster preparedness, I thought this would be a great segue into covering the events of Ethos Week. What is compelling is that on his account, Cash did not expect to be a world expert on forensic DNA cataloguing of human remains from disasters. And he was quite aware from the beginning that such a business was fraught with ethical dilemmas, the most immediate of them profiteering from the suffering of others. In the article from Focus EMU Online describing the award's presentation, Cash commented, "We made a decision early on not to try to profiteer on this project...If, in the process, we had brought some comfort to these hundreds of families [from the 9/11 attacks] but in the end we had lost the company, I would still have thought we had made a good investment and the right decision." Gene Codes Corporation continues to engage in other projects with a humanitarian purpose. The most recent is The DNA Shoah Project, which uses its products and services, according to the website "to provide information on living and deceased relatives and to help Holocaust orphans identify next of kin." I can well understand why Howard Cash has been recognized for his professional efforts to ensure that a business such as his own does the right thing. Indeed, the whole specialty in which his company is engaged is an ethical minefield. A whole host of questions come up in this regard. One in particular hits me. Disasters bring up one form of profiteering. This kind of profiteering seems easy to recognize. But what I would like to know is: what does profiteering look like when it is not from a most extreme situation? I am looking for less extreme situations cited in the news (not disasters, not Enron, and not funeral home directors bilking the bereaved etc.) but some that we more commonly face.