blog.bioethics.net
a Nature Top 50 science blog from The American Journal of Bioethics
Entries from blog.bioethics.net tagged with 'research ethics'
The November Issue of AJOB Is Now Online!
With H1N1 and flu vaccines on everyone's minds, the November issue of The American Journal of Bioethics couldn't be more timely. What do people think about the measures necessary to protect ourselves from flu? Do we, or more importantly should we trust our government to protect us in a pandemic?... (read the rest)
Open Access Publisher Under Scrutiny for Taking Sham Paper
First came The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Density, now comes The Open Information Science Journal. As The Scientist tells us today, it's not just the large academic publishers that are in hot water for publishing phony journals, but open source publications that are apparently attempting to publish fake... (read the rest)
A Three-Legged Dog Cannot Run an IRB No Matter How Hard Congress Tries
As if the Coast IRB sting couldn't get more crazy, the company itself has decided to close up shop on the more than 300 clinical trials it was reviewing, according to an AP story, and transfer them to another company. But the best part of all is that who helped... (read the rest)
GAO Says "Gotcha!" to Coast IRB
Who knew that GAO was so crafty? Evidently not Coast IRB, for one. Well, maybe it's not quite SO crafty, but GAO was able to get the IRB to fall for a fake clinical trial that showed that the review board for hire was asleep at the wheel when it... (read the rest)
The Data Fake That Set the World Afire
If it is actually the case that Andrew Wakefield faked, fudged, or whatever you want to call "making up" one's data, in his original studies regarding the effects of vaccines on children who later came to have autism, as reported in the UK's Times Online, then his research misconduct didn't... (read the rest)
Who Is Subject Number 2143? Oh, He's Just My Son.
What do researchers do in an era of scarce research funding and difficult to find research subjects? Enlist their own children, of course! At least according to a New York Times piece reprinted in the Dallas Morning News, researchers are capitalizing on the fact that their kids are a captive... (read the rest)
Didn't You Just Know This Was True? Vicks May Be Bad For You
How many of you have the urge upon reading this headline "Vicks Might Make Kids Sicker" to immediately forward the article to your mother and say, "See I told you so all those years ago! I knew that nasty stuff was making me feel worse!!" Actually, those noxious fumes radiating... (read the rest)
Something to Declare...But No One Cares
Disclosing financial conflicts of interest to potential research subjects does not effect their willingness to participate in research, found a recent Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Wake Forest University study. In fact, the effects of such disclosures upon potential research participants were minimal, except in one group--the participants told that the... (read the rest)
Discovered [Sort Of]: Personalized [Not Quite Therapeutic] Cell Stuff
The latest achievement in the stem cell research community was announced yesterday in ScienceXpress finding that iPS cells can be generated from ALS patients which then can be used to create healthy motor neuron cells. As the authors of study put it, the generation of iPS cells from these patients... (read the rest)
Pulling the sheet off ghostwriters
By Ricki Lewis A report in the April 16 Journal of the American Medical Association exposes and laments the use of “guest authors” and ghostwriters on medical journal reports and review articles. A “guest author” is a researcher paid, such as by a pharmaceutical company, to lend her or his... (read the rest)
The global scramble for ready-to-consent populations
By Stuart Rennie Last year, Jill Fisher at Arizona State University wrote a very interesting article on the concept of 'ready-to-recruit' populations for biomedical research for the journal Qualitative Inquiry (subscription required, goddammit). The term 'ready-to-recruit' is a concept used in the pharmaceutical industry to describe populations that do not... (read the rest)
Is being infected with malaria worth $2000?
If it is, and you live in the Seattle area, there was some very exciting news last week. The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute would like to trade that two grand for the time and inconvenience of having malaria-carrying mosquitos held up to your arm until they bite you. Here's... (read the rest)
Following up: academic fraud, sitting on research, wrecked football players
Here are a few updates and extensions to earlier posts on blog.bioethics.net: Academic journal deja vu A few weeks back two researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported in Nature that they had found evidence of thousands of duplicated and plagiarized articles in biomedical journals. The researchers... (read the rest)
A comment from Paul Gelsinger on gene therapy and informed consent
In a guest post earlier this week Alan Milstein, the attorney who represented Jesse Gelsinger's family, wrote about his reaction to a recent editorial by James Wilson about gene therapy and informed consent in the journal Human Gene Therapy. The guest post prompted a number of comments, including one from... (read the rest)
On gene therapy and informed consent
By Alan Milstein January’s issue of Human Gene Therapy offers some intriguing commentary on the issue of informed consent in gene transfer trials. I became aware of the articles when a writer for TheScientist Blog called for my reaction to the Editorial by James Wilson, because I had represented the... (read the rest)
Synthetic bacterial genome coverage roundup
Here's a quick scan of the reaction to Thursday's news that the Venter Institute has created a synthetic bacterial genome: + Some researchers were skeptical of the relative importance of the Venter's Institute's achievement, noting that the research team didn't use the genome to actually run a cell. Said Stony... (read the rest)
Academic journal deja vu
Mounir Errami and Harold Garner -- both of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center -- report in a Nature commentary this week that duplication and plagiarism appear to be on the rise in biomedical academic publishing. After using a text analyzer on a sample of Medline abstracts, they found... (read the rest)
Zetia situation demonstrates need for a more open clinical trial process
By Alan C. Milstein The news about Zetia and Vytorin once again raises a major problem in the way the FDA allows drug companies to control the information about the clinical trials they conduct, often to the detriment to public health. Apparently, Merck and Schering-Plough had completed the trial which... (read the rest)
Separated at birth... for research
The story of Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein sounds like something from a movie. The identical twins were separated at birth, adopted by different families. In their early 30s Schein started looking into information about their birth mother and in the process found out that she had a twin.... (read the rest)
Weekend reading: physician-assisted suicide, organ donation, paleovirology
NYT Mag: Death in the Family Daniel Bergner writes about the effort of former Washington governor Booth Gardner, who has Parkinson's, to get a physician-assisted suicide referendum passed there in 2008: “Why do this?” he asked, turning from the other tables toward me. “I want to be involved in public... (read the rest)
Craig Venter on the ethics of creating synthetic organisms
Over at Bloggingheads.tv Carl Zimmer interviewed Craig Venter recently about a wide range of topics, from personal genome sequencing to Venter's work on synthetic biology. Venter tells Zimmer that the reports a few months back that his team was right on the verge of creating a synthetic microbe were... (read the rest)
Answers we'll probably never have
The British Psychological Society's Research Digest Blog recently asked 13 psychologists the question "What's the most important psychology experiment that's never been done?" And while some of the research ideas prompted by the question just simply haven't been attempted yet, some of the most fascinating -- looking into the relative... (read the rest)
Can't we all get along? Ethical tensions between medical journals and international health agencies
By Stuart Rennie Last week, the Lancet (subscription required) came out with a stinging editorial about certain actions by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. The journal has never been shy to offer judgments and pronouncements in its editorial section, but this time, there are very pointed accusations of dishonesty... (read the rest)
Art Caplan at MSNBC: Giving up on gene therapy is wrong reaction
Art writes that the death of Jolee Mohr should lead to new patient protections: The recent death of Jolee Mohr is likely to have a seismic impact on the future of gene therapy research. Biotech companies, private investors and government funders will shy away from sponsoring further research because Mohr... (read the rest)
The ethics of the research that helps us understand Larry Craig
A footnote to the bizarre tragicomedy in which Larry Craig now appears is a doctoral dissertation from the 1960s by a researcher named Laud Humphreys. While a grad student at Washington University in St. Louis, Humphreys conducted an ethnography of men who had sex with men in public bathrooms. His... (read the rest)
How not to explain African distrust of Western medicine
By Stuart Rennie The New York Times has an article this week with the ambitious title 'Why Africa fears Western Medicine' by Harriet A. Washington, author of the generally well-received book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The title... (read the rest)
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