There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
Category: Research Ethics
This will hurt a bit
In a piece titled in a fashion to simultaneously win the internet and cause every male reader to wince, Michelle Meyer asks “Whose Business Is It If You Want a Bee To Sting Your Penis? Should IRBs Be Policing Self-Experimentation?” In this piece she describes the case of a Cornell graduate student who carried out […]
An Attack of the What-Ifs
Among the comments to the last post, there’s this from Parmenion59: So…if a cure for lung cancer is found, and the study has been funded through money from a tobacco company…the BMJ won’t publish said study? Way to go BMJ. Hmmm. At least on the face of it, this looks like an important point – […]
Smoking out Tobacco Industry-Supported Research
BMJ Open, along with a couple of other journals, published a statement a couple of days ago saying that they’d no longer accept papers based on research wholly or partially funded by the tobacco industry. The gloss on the statement is damning: The tobacco industry, far from advancing knowledge, has used research to deliberately produce ignorance […]
Research Ethics and Ethical Problems
Noted on Ben Goldacre’s twitter feed a couple of weeks ago was this article in Slate about the recruitment of pregnant women into drug trials. Essentially, there’s a situation in which there’s a dearth of information about the impact of drugs during pregnancy. According to the article, [p]harmaceutical companies are not willing to navigate the […]
Safety First? How the Current Drug Approval System Lets Some Patients Down
Post by Julian Savulescu Cross-posted from the Practical Ethics blog, and relating to this paper in the JME. Andrew Culliford, whose story is featured in the Daily Mail, is one of the estimated 7 in 100,000 people living with Motor Neuron disease, a progressive degenerative disease which attacks muscles, leaving those affected eventually unable even to […]
The Value of Role Reversal
Guest Post by Rebecca Dresser, Washington University in St. Louis Not so long ago, medical researchers had a habit of using themselves as guinea pigs. Many scientists saw self-experimentation as the most ethical way to try out their ideas. By going first, researchers could test their hypotheses and see how novel interventions affected human beings. Today […]
X-rays, aslyum seekers and research ethics/governance
There is an interesting story here: in the Guardian about a research trial being carried out by the UK border agency using dental x-rays to try and identify the age of young asylum seekers. […]
Of Tusks and Tuskegee: A Problem in Research Ethics
Xtaldave, by his own admission, has the horn. Well, if you’re being accurate about it, he has the tusk. But what’s important is that he has a whopping great piece of ivory to play with. Dave works in the labs here in Manchester, doing clever things with chemicals and science and crystalography and that sort […]
Is Bird Flu Research a Security Risk?
A story that has had a little airtime on the news over the last 24 hours or so concerns requests by US officials that details of research into a bird flu variant be held back from publication on the grounds that it might be of use to terrorists: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended […]