On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I’m going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
Category Archives: Research with human subjects
I thought I understood the extent of the bureaucracy here.
I haven’t mentioned it here before, but I’m currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the “stake holders” at the university from whom we ought to seek “buy-in”.
As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one:
A question for the scientific hivemind: Do IRBs get protocols from evil scientists?
One of my students raised a really good question in class today, a question to which I do not know the answer — but maybe you do.
We were discussing some of the Very Bad Experiments* that prompted current thinking** about what it is and is not ethically permissible to do with human subjects of scientific research. We had noted that institutions like our university have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must approve your protocol before you can conduct research with human subjects. At this point, my student asked:
Clearest judgment you’ll get here.
I finally saw The Constant Gardener this weekend.
If your aim is to conduct your drug trials ethically, do not conduct them like the drug trials portrayed in the movie. I could entertain questions on specific details, but the scenario is so black and white that I don’t imagine you’d have any.
Serving two masters is sometimes impossible.
The last two meetings of my ethics in science class have focused on some of the history of research with human subjects and on the changing statements of ethical principles or rules governing such experimentation. Looking at these statements (the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report especially) against the backdrop of some very serious missteps (Nazi medical experiments and the Public Health Service’s Tuskegee syphilis experiment), it’s painfully clear how much regulation is scandal-driven — a reaction to a screw-up, rather than something that researchers took the time to think about before they embarked on their research. Worse, it’s clear that researchers are perfectly capable of ignoring existing moral codes or standards to get the job done.
What some of these researchers may not have understood (but my students seem pretty well attuned to) is that in ignoring the norms that one ought, as a physician or a scientist, to be committed to, one comes perilously close to choosing not to be a physician or a scientist.
Good ethics, good science, and the question of whether some knowledge is poisoned.
In comments to a pair of posts about research with animals, some issues that are germane to the subject of research with human subjects have come up. In particular, they raise the question of whether scientists ought to use results from ethically flawed experiments. And, this question pushes the question of the extent to which ethically flawed research can still be scientifically sound.
Here, I want to dig into the first question, but I’ll only make a first pass at the second.