Safety and ethics in ACS and major scientific and engineering societies: A gap analysis

The American Chemical Society (ACS) Chemical Professional's Code of Conduct treats safety in a constrained fashion, denying it the emphasis it enjoys in other major science & engineering societies. This paper compares and contrasts the ACS document with representative codes of ethics from several sources, demonstrating that the non-ACS documents rest on a firmly-stated ethical basis and meet other criteria for communicating the primary position of safety. Changes are proposed to the ACS Code to better align with best practices in other organizations and to follow recent advances in promoting safety within the ACS.