In the last few years, medical education policy makers have expressed concern about changes in the ethical attitude and behavior of medical trainees during the course of their education. They claim that newly graduated physicians (MDs) are entering residency years with inappropriate habits and attitudes earned during their education. This allegation has been supported by numerous research on th...

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 ...

The extensive participation of German physicians in the atrocities of the Holocaust raises many questions concerning the potential for moral erosion in medicine. What circumstances and methods of rationalisation allowed doctors to turn from healers into accomplices of genocide? Are physicians still vulnerable to corruption of their guiding principles and, if so, what can be done to prevent this...

Eight research protocols which had previously been approved by Ethical Research Committees (ERCs) were reviewed in simulated review committees set up during a symposium on medical ethics. Only three protocols were considered to provide fully adequate information to allow ethical review and only one protocol was thought to provide sufficient guarantees on the ethical issues raised by the propose...

The present commentary is based on the following considerations: 1) for the purposes of authorisation, a distinction is drawn between "research" and "intervention". The procedures for authorising the former are more complex, the relevant controls are stricter and approval has to be granted by a Research Ethics Committee (REC); 2) although the debate is still open, it is barely credible to claim...

This report provides practical guidance on refinement of the use of food and fluid control as motivational tools for macaques used in behavioural neuroscience research. The guidance is based on consideration of the scientific literature and, where data are lacking, expert opinion and professional experience, including that of the members of a Working Group convened by the United Kingdom Nationa...

Implantable RFID chips are being seen as a potential security device in near future with the application oriented availability of these chips in marketplace. The applications are seen in a wide domain from health monitoring to emergency solutions, but there is a darker side with erosion of privacy and breach in the bodily integrity with implantation of such chips. The applications of the implan...

The ethical review of research on human beings, and indeed the ethical review of broader ranges of human activity, is a growth industry. I want to look here at the ethical review of research on humans and raise some questions about the direction it is taking. I am pessimistic about where the institutions that we have set up are leading us and I want to sound a warning note and suggest some chan...

Health research initiatives worldwide are growing in scope and complexity, particularly as they move into the developing world. Expanding health research activity in low- and middle-income countries has resulted in a commensurate rise in the need for sound ethical review structures and functions in the form of Research Ethics Committees (RECs). The urgent need for continued capacity development...