All animal procedures were performed in accordance with UK Home Office Guidance on the operation of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and institutional ethical approval (PPL60/4114 and PPL 60/4429). Male white Landrace pigs (SAC Commercial Ltd, Edinburgh, UK) and miR-21 knockout mice (1) were maintained on a 12 hour light/dark cycle with free access to food and water at a designated ...

Legal and ethical issues form an important component of modern research, related to the subject and researcher. This article seeks to briefly review the various international guidelines and regulations that exist on issues related to informed consent, confidentiality, providing incentives and various forms of research misconduct. Relevant original publications (The Declaration of Helsinki, Belm...

This article begins a new six-part series in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association devoted to medical ethics. Each issue, a case will be presented from the Ethics committee at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged (HRCA) in Boston, Massachusetts. Following a description of the case and a discussion of the ethical issues that the case raises, Dr. Steven Levenson will disc...

Clinical research involving critically ill patients is necessary to reduce the extreme morbidity and mortality encountered in the intensive care unit (ICU). Yet such research is ethically challenging because critically ill patients usually are unable to consent for research participation, because conflicts of interest occur among investigators, and because discovering new knowledge while simult...

cloning is a term traditionally used to describe different processes for duplicating biological material. a clone is an organism that is a genetic copy of an existing one. the use of the technique of nuclear transfer for reproduction of human beings is surrounded by strong ethical and legal concerns and controversies. some international organizations have made significant efforts to establish c...

The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is an audacious endeavor to obtain whole genome sequences of representatives from all eukaryotic species on earth. In addition the Project’s technical and organizational challenges, it also faces complicated ethical, legal, social issues. This paper, members EBP’s Ethical, Legal, Social Issues (ELSI) Committee, catalogs these ELSI concerns arising EBP. While we...

Review boards responsible for vetting the ethical conduct of research have been criticised for their costliness, unreliability and inappropriate standards when evaluating some non-medical research, but the basic value of mandatory ethical review has not been questioned. When the standards that review boards use to evaluate research proposals are applied to review board practices, it is clear th...

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has proposed that regulatory oversight for research with human subjects be extended beyond the protection of individual research participants to include the protection of social groups. To accomplish this, the commission recommends that investigators and ethics review boards a) work directly with community representatives to develop study methods that ...

Physicians vary widely in their familiarity with ethical theories and methods and their sensitivity toward ethical issues. It is important for physicians to improve their skills in addressing ethical questions. Obstetrician–gynecologists who are familiar with the concepts of medical ethics will be better able to approach complex ethical situations in a clear and structured way. By considering t...