The past few weeks, I've been looking for stories to write about here. It seems that everywhere I've looked, I have only been able to find (rather whiny) stories about ethics review boards overstepping their boundaries, and putting up barriers to the furtherance of science and research. These/…

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A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights the fact that, on battlefields today, urgency, acuity and need are still drivers for surgical innovation.

Here's the story: On Battlefields, Survival Odds Rise

Every war brings medical innovations, as horrific injuries force surgeons to come… Read full post »

Like all nonviolent human endeavours, the conduct of human-subjects research is grounded in trust. Research subjects trust researchers to conduct their research ethically which means, for example, minimizing risks and safeguarding the subjects' privacy. Without some degree of trust, research w…

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A recent story from CBC news has uncovered that in the US, clinical trials are being done from which potential participants who identify as gay or lesbian are being excluded. This trend was uncovered by a biostatistician who was gathering data on enrollment into cancer studies and found that,/…

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If we could clone Neanderthals, should we? Why or why not? What would the ethical pitfalls be? Would the consequences of doing of it be the problem, or would the research leading to the cloning be problematic in its own right?

Here's the article inspiring the questions, by Zach Zorich, in Archa… Read full post »

While the Olympics don't officially start until tomorrow, the "anti-doping" investigation clinics are open and working well before the games begin. But this year, those who test athletes for "doping" are faced with another possible way for athletes to enhance performance: gene therapy.

Here is/…

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Here's an update to a troubling story I published here almost a year ago. Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a senior lecturer in the Departments of Medicine and Histopathology at The Royal Free Hospital (a teaching hospital in London) and a consultant in experimental Gastroenterology. Last year, when I/…

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Here's an update to a troubling story I published here almost a year ago. Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a senior lecturer in the Departments of Medicine and Histopathology at The Royal Free Hospital (a teaching hospital in London) and a consultant in experimental Gastroenterology. Last year, when I/…

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This week, just outside of Toronto, an unencrypted USB key was lost that contained the names, government-issued ID numbers and personal health information of more than 80,000 patients who visited a local H1N1 vaccine clinic.

Here's the story from CBC News:
Ont. privacy commissioner orders 'str… Read full post »

A recent story in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel points to what seems like a new kind of potential conflict of interest in medicine. We've published various stories on conflicts of interest in medicine and research before more than once — stories about ghostwriting, asking auth… Read full post »

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed on Yoni Freedhoff's excellent Weighty Matters blog. The blog entry and podcast are here: Milk, conflicts of interest, and med-school profs.

Here's a bit from the blog, setting up the issue:

...should University professors disclose their potential conflicts of in… Read full post »

Controversy has arisen over the appointment of one of Pfizer's VPs to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). (For those who don't know, CIHR is the Canadian government's main agency for funding research in the area of health.)

Here's the story, as reported b…

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It was with some surprise that I happened across this website. It's called ResearchMatch and it's described as a "National (US) Research Study Recruitment Registry". The press release that led me to the ResearchMatch website was one announcing that Rockefeller University was now joining the re/…

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Conducting research with all due attention to regulations and ethical standards doesn't automatically insulate it from criticism and controversy. Nor, for that matter, should adherence to rules & regs necessarily imply that one's research cannot be the subject of ethical scrutiny. Even when re…

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A recent story from the Huffington Post, as reported by Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, highlights a story about a cardiac surgery trial at Columbia that began in ~ 1999.

The story reports that the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) in the US has requested that Columbia University/…

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Last month, it was announced that an HIV vaccine trial carried out in Thailand showed hope for further progress towards use of a vaccine for HIV. This was not a small trial — it was carried out on more than 16000 Thai volunteers, costing $105 million USD. The initial press release/…

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Should we trust Big Pharma? Plenty of people don't, and for good reasons familiar to readers of this blog.

Over at the Business Ethics Blog, I just posted a longish item about reasons for, and against, trusting Big Pharma — or rather, trusting particular companies on particular issues on…

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This isn't a research ethics story per se - but a fascinating story about some exciting research that highlights a few important things that researchers, research ethics board members and the public often forget.

Here's the story, from the New York Times: A Race in Cardiology

A race is on to de… Read full post »

Here's an announcement for a new "interactive" or "deliberative" survey that we are running, on Personal Genomics, Privacy & Consent. Anyone can participate. (We refer to the survey as "interactive" or "deliberative" because participants get to see each other's answers, and respond to them, wh…

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There is a debate out there in the research ethics world about "outsourcing" research ethics review responsibilities. In other words, taking the (Research Ethics Board) REB from the University or hospital and situating it outside of the institution. For those of you not familiar with Canadian/…

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Call it effect of the "Back to School" time of year, filled with hope for new beginnings, but I am compelled to write a blog entry about something positive in research ethics. I have found the last few months replete with discouraging stories about deception and bad behaviour in the/…

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As reported by The Guardian:

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit grou… Read full post »

Two weeks ago we blogged about a ghostwriting case involving Wyeth. So we were interested to see that PLoS Medicine has now put an entire archive of documents related to Wyeth's sophisticated ghostwriting system.

See also this editorial accompanying the archive, from PLoS Medicine's Chief Edito…

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A recent paper in BMC Medical Ethics shows that, in a small sample, a majority of research participants expressed a therapeutic misconception about the research in which they were involved. This isn't necessarily news. The notion of therapeutic misconception has been around for a long time and/…

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Yes, in space. We've blogged before about ethical issues related to research done overseas. But research ethics in space? That's a new one for us.

Check out this conversation with Paul Root Wolpe, from the New York Times: Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel

Q. AS NASA’S CHIEF… Read full post »