Ethics behind closed doors: do research ethics committees need secrecy?

Do we need research ethics committees?

This issue of the journal sees a number of exchanges on significant ethical problems. ‘Nudges’ have attracted a good deal of attention recently in the context of the ethics of public health interventions. Martin Wilkinson (see page 486) writes a guest editorial introducing important debate on Yashar Saghai’s featured article, Salvaging the concept of nudge (see page 487, Editor’s choice). Also,...

Research ethics committees and paternalism.

In this paper the authors argue that research ethics committees (RECs) should not be paternalistic by rejecting research that poses risk to people competent to decide for themselves. However it is important they help to ensure valid consent is sought from potential recruits and protect vulnerable people who cannot look after their own best interests. The authors first describe the tragic deaths...

Research ethics committees: agents of research policy?

UNLABELLED The purpose of this commentary is to describe the unintended effects ethics committees may have on research and to analyse the regulatory and administrative problems of clinical trials. DISCUSSION The Finnish law makes an arbitrary distinction between medical research and other health research, and the European Union's directive for good clinical trials further differentiates drug ...

Ethics committees and ethics consultants

Ethics committee and ethics consultants are among the more interesting phenomena associated with bioethics. Although in some respects both reach back to the ancient origins of medical ethics, in other ways they are reflections of a ‘postmodern’ society that seeks moral resolutions while remaining agnostic about substantive moral absolutes. In the present article I shall describe the history of ...

Research ethics need consideration.