TABLE OF CONTENTS September 2002 to August 2003 was a terrible 12-month period in engineering ethics. During this time, a scientist at Bell Laboratories committed nanotechnology fraud, the Columbia space shuttle exploded, Guidant received the largest pay-out to date from the Food and Drug Administration for hiding medical device defects, and the New York City blackout occurred. While reflecting on these events, I wondered how often disasters occurred after warnings by engineers. I knew that warnings about the Columbia explosion mirrored the warnings about the Challenger explosion. As an experiment, I challenged myself to find similar major disasters. Within 4 hours of Googling, I found eight other national examples. Later, in early 2005, I replaced the eighth example with the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.
Each of these 13 disasters is detailed in a case study chapter. Each case study chapter contains the following sections: the news story as reported by the New York Times, the back story, applicable...
