It has been my pleasure in the last two decades to serve on a couple of serious Ethics Committees.
My last job had a prime focus in this area and I have always been interested in the delicate tightrope that this discipline requires. One of the Committees was a teaching hospital research committee and the other was the CSIRO department in Adelaide. This latter being largely responsible in latter days for significant research in human dietary issues and the development of the now wildly popular CSIRO diet. This project only being in embryonic stage when I was an active member of the Committee.
So I was interested to ehar the enormously talented Norman Swan discuss the whole question of Ethics Committees on the current Health report (here) (and sound here). Well worth the 30 mins reading or listening time.
Swan raised what must ever be the pirennial issues for Ethics Committees, what are they supposed to do, to whom are they accounatble and do they work. The particular example he cites is horrendous. My experience is pale by comparison though a number of things resonate with me.
Some questions I wonder about:
- Who comprises such committees?. Traditionally clergy have sat on such but I only ever regarded myself as marginally qualified with generalist education in ethics.
- What force do they have when things go wrong? This is the substance of Swan's excellent report. It would appear very little
- Are there common national standards, and can they be uniformly enforced? Swan's reports would seem to suggest a double negative. There is a great deal of trust placed in the integritry of the institutions but this may be misplaced!!
4 comments:
I was shocked by this story too. I can't believe that this research was approved by the uni, I remember the trouble I had having my undergrad research approved and it was less invasive than this. Very disconcerting.
I actually thought that Swan was brilliant in this. For a doctor he is a very good reporter!
My experience on these committees was that the non-experts relied heavily on the backgrounding that the "experts" gave. I think the lay people need to do better than this, as this case showed....asking how would I feel in this situation is a pretty good start.
What should we expect from academics?
Personally I think you should expect a lot more. One of the reason there are "lay" people on these committees is to offer a degree of accountability, I guess.
Like all these sort of things one would hope that these days there is a greater degree of orientation for ethics committees.
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