By Suzanne M. Rivera How to Survive a Plague is a moving chronicle of the onset of the AIDS epidemic as seen through the lens of the activists who mobilized to identify and make available the effective treatments we have today. Beginning at the start of the epidemic, when little was known about the HIV…
By Nadia N. Sawicki Google’s informal corporate slogan is “Don’t be evil.” Whole Foods is a Fortune 500 company with a net revenue of 10 billion dollar that prides itself on a commitment to social responsibility. Both companies have pledged to do long-term good in the world, even at the expense of short-term gains, and both…
By Suzanne M. Rivera, Ph.D. In regulatory and research ethics circles, it is fairly common to hear people say they prefer the term “research participant” to “research subject” because they feel it’s more respectful. They think the word “subject” is demeaning. I respectfully disagree. I think it’s honest. The federal agencies that oversee human research…
By Casey Thomson After what we hope was a hearty meal (or at least a restful, happy holiday) this past Thanksgiving for all of our readers, we are back with this week’s Twitter round-up – just a few days behind schedule. Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) tweeted an article by Stefan Fatsis on the different perspectives regarding child…
By Christopher Robertson When I moved to the University of Arizona, I quickly discovered something that I’ll politely call “heterogeneity” in Institutional Review Board’s (IRB) policies and practices. All of a sudden, some of the rather vanilla human subjects research practices I had been doing for years, with IRB approval, were now forbidden. Turns out…
By Suzanne M. Rivera, Ph.D. For years, mainstream and extremist organizations have waged campaigns against the use of animals. While PETA successfully deploys propaganda featuring provocative models in sexually explicit positions to denounce the use of animals for food, clothing and experimentation, other groups, such as the Animal Liberation Brigade, engage in violent (some would…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Talk about perfect timing. Just on the heels of Tuesday’s fantastic event at HLS on the Guatemala STD Inoculation studies (video to come soon), the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has released A Study Guide for “Ethically Impossible” STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. This is the Commission’s…
TODAY 12:30-2:00 Wasserstein Hall, Classroom 3019 Harvard Law School In the late 1940s, US and Guatemalan researchers conducted a host of experiments on vulnerable Guatemalan subjects, purposefully exposing them to, and infecting them with a number of STDs without their consent. The experiments were kept hidden for more than half a century, until they were discovered and…
By Laura Stark When it comes to research with human subjects, about 60 percent of faculty members and 50 percent of graduate students learned about ethics through online or print resources according to a recent survey. These data could be seen as good or bad news—depending on how you feel about getting your ethics through…
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:30-2:00 Wasserstein Hall, Classroom 3019 Harvard Law School In the late 1940s, US and Guatemalan researchers conducted a host of experiments on vulnerable Guatemalan subjects, purposefully exposing them to and infecting them with a number of STDs without their consent. The experiments were kept hidden for more than half a century,…
