This edition of Research Ethics Roundup covers service dog safety in lab environments, standard of care in a sepsis trial, ethical considerations of cancelling a basic income study, and the resignation of a famed researcher after high-profile retractions. Read more
You are a physician at a Catholic hospital investigating a new treatment for a women’s health condition. This healthy volunteer study requires an unpleasant and somewhat risky procedure, so you do not expect to meet your enrollment target. The first five participants are nuns who say their primary motivation is altruism. What, if anything, should you do? Read more
This edition of Research Ethics Roundup covers the favorability of animal research among Americans, a hostile workplace in an empathy research lab, conflicts of interest in Vitamin D deficiency research, and plagiarism in breast cancer research. Read more
You are the chief human research protections officer at a prestigious academic medical center (AMC). You have just discovered that two doctors on your staff have been secretly conducting a clinical study on their patients. The doctors have broken every rule in the human subjects protection book. They did not even tell their patients they were in a clinical study, and some of them died. The president of the AMC has called a meeting this afternoon where you will have to explain the situation and make your recommendations. What a nightmare! To complicate things, it turns out that the study treatment is an astonishing medical breakthrough that can save thousands of lives. The doctors want to submit a paper to a major medical journal by the end of the week. A Nobel Prize could be in order. Read more
This edition of Research Ethics Roundup covers African-American participation in DNA testing, difficulties recruiting participants for Alzheimer's trials, even when results are promising, the deaths of eleven babies born to mothers in a Dutch drug trial involving generic Viagra, and a call for research misconduct investigations across Britain by the United Kingdom’s House of Commons science and technology committee. Read more
