As part of the ongoing national consultations regarding the draft additional protocol on biomedical research, the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics wishes to state its opinion to the Swedish Ministry of Social Affairs, and thereby to the Steering Committee on Bioethics (CDBI). The Council is greatly appreciative of the continued efforts of the CDBI, and welcomes that an additional prot...

Careful analysis of the ethics of research on mechanisms of aging needs to recognize the complexity of human biology. Many contemporary bioethicists and policy-makers are exploring the ethics of ‘anti-aging’ interventions; however, current ethical analysis of biomedical research into disease processes and aging mechanisms is dominated by hyperbolic commentary. Numerous analyses in the bioethics...

On April 7, 2017, TEDD (Tissue Engineering for Drug Development and Substance Testing) and the Animal Research Foundation joined forces at ZHAW Waedenswil to present their latest scientific results in the domain of the 3Rs of biomedical research: how to Refine, Reduce and Replace animal testing with alternative approaches.

It is widely accepted that informed consent is a requirement of ethical biomedical research. It is less clear why this is so. As an argumentative strategy the article asks whether it would be legitimate for the state to require people to participate in research. This article argues that the consent requirement cannot be defended by appeal to any simple principle, such as not treating people mer...

Funders of biomedical research are often challenged to understand how a new funding initiative fits within the agency's portfolio and the larger research community. While traditional assessment relies on retrospective review by subject matter experts, it is now feasible to design portfolio assessment and gap analysis tools leveraging administrative and grant application data that can be used fo...

The European Group on Ethics is made up of 12 independent experts appointed by the European Commission. It is a multidisciplinary body that advises the Commission on ethical aspects of science and new technologies in connection with the preparation or implementation of EU legislation or policies. Its latest, 17th, opinion is reproduced below: since the current EU framework programme of medical ...

Two of the cornerstones of science advancement are rigor in designing and performing scientific research and the ability to reproduce biomedical research findings. The application of rigor ensures robust and unbiased experimental design, methodology, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of results. When a result can be reproduced by multiple scientists, it validates the original results and ...

Progress in biomedical research depends upon the intellectual and physical effort of talented scientists. In the U.S., the composition of this essential resource has undergone substantial change over the past three decades. Postdocs have become the largest segment of the workforce in biomedical science and in recent years, foreign postdocs have accounted for all of the growth in the postdoctora...

Mentors rarely receive education about the unique needs of underrepresented scholars in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. We hypothesized that mentor-training and peer-mentoring interventions for these scholars would enrich the perceived quality and breadth of discussions between mentor-protégé dyads (i.e., mentor-protégé pairs). Our multicenter, randomized study of 150 underrepresented s...