About a month ago, Stuart Rennie wrote a blog entitled, “Research
Ethics as a Sideshow,” which can be found http://globalbioethics.blogspot.com/.
In the blog, Rennie reports on a disturbing, growing trend in the realm of
research publication. Apparently, it is becoming commonplace for journals to
publish ethically questionable studies, as long as they are interesting, and
alongside them publish multiple editorials which point out the subtle to
glaring violations of ethical conduct that can be found in the studies. He gives
the example of a recent tuberculosis treatment study which was published in the
International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease despite not having any
method of obtaining informed consent from the participants of the study. It was
published alongside two editorials that rejected the reasons for skipping
informed consent given by the researchers. Rennie addresses the possibilities
of simply not publishing the articles, or retracting them after they have been
published. However, he concludes that it is unlikely either will occur.
How can
we allow this to continue? The whole point of ethics codes is to protect people
from being exploited and abused in experiments and trials. This practice of
publishing unethical goes against the concept entirely. To be fair, each of the
studies that was published had already been approved by an ethics review board.
However, the multiple steps in the research and publication process should
serve as checks and balances for this sort of thing, otherwise there is no
point to peer review. To me it seems like a chain reaction is starting, one
that should not happen. If publishers become accustomed to accepting unethical
trials as long as they add on editorials that say as much, then IRBs may become
more willing to approve questionable trials, if for no other reason than the
existence of many precedents. We cannot stand by and watch all of our current
ethical safeguards fall apart. Journals should not be allowed to publish trials
that are obviously ethically unsound, regardless of how “entertaining” they may
be.
1 comment:
I think you raise a legitimate concern when you say that unethical studies shouldn’t be published simply to incite interest or “entertain” readers. However, I also believe that publishing studies that seem to have violated our accepted ethical standards alongside editorial criticism should be encouraged in order to raise awareness of the issues and to minimize the chances that such atrocities would ever be repeated in the future. In the tuberculosis study that you cite, for example, we see how important it was to publish the study along with the editorials that pointed out its ethical violations especially because in this case it was approved by an ethics review committee, and so this almost automatically implies that the study had no ethical issues. When we are more aware that even ethical review committees can approve of studies that are potentially unethical, it encourages us to constantly question what our accepted standards for morality and ethical practice in research are, in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of how to ensure protection of subjects and their rights.
Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but we can apply the same logic to studies such as the Nazi Experimentations during WWII, the Japanese Unit 731, and other such horrendous human experiments that have been conducted in the past. If they are never published, the details of the atrocities – such as how the Nazis forced their victims naked into tubs of ice water and watched as they lost consciousness in sub-zero temperatures – would never have remained in the collective conscience of people worldwide. In Japan, controversies surround the fact that criticism of Unit 731 is harshly censored from publication, and the fact that even textbooks try to “dilute” the details of the horrors committed during the experiments are causing huge problems among today’s young generation, as they are only aware of a naïve version of 731 and are ignorant of the harsh details (which could only come to light in the publication of the experiments and their criticism).
Thus, for researchers to be able to better assess, question, and expand our current understandings of ethical practice in human experimentation and to prevent atrocities from repeating themselves in the future, it is of utmost importance for the details of studies and their criticism to remain in the collective conscience of as many people as possible. Publishing studies of questionable ethicality alongside editorial criticism is the first step towards reaching these goals.
http://www.pacificwar.org.au/JapWarCrimes/Denying_truth2.html
http://remember.org/educate/medexp.html
Post a Comment