We’re two weeks away from the 2015 Social, Behavioral, and Educational Research Conference (SBER15) and the 2015 Advancing Ethical Research Conference (AER15), so we thought we’d take a look back at a compelling moment from a previous conference. Read on for this week’s Time Capsule Tuesday. 

Conference: The Evolution of Protecting Human Subjects: From Nuremburg to the Nineties, November 1991 
Session: Should We Abandon Informed Consent?
Presenter: Arthur L. Caplan

“What started out as a doctrine heavily committed to protection, rightly or wrongly, is now operating under a very different paradigm. The perception is that human experimentation is a good, that it represents the latest in treatment, that the line between therapy and experimentation is awfully blurry, that probably it is much better to do something than nothing in the face of dread disease and so what we ought to do is make sure that people have the right to access experimentation as quickly as possible. IRBs and other individuals concerned with human experimentation need to make sure that the access is fair.”