Institutional Review Board

Institutional Review Board Mission

In this article, I scrutinize the process by which scientific research on human subjects is regulated by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). At the outset, let us agree that at least some biomedical scientific research on human subjects must be externally monitored and that whether government should sometimes be involved in that process is at least an open question. We simply cannot forget the ...

Victor Frankenstein's Institutional Review Board Proposal, 1790

To show how the case of Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein brings light to the ethical and moral issues raised in Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, we nest an imaginary IRB proposal dated August 1790 by Victor Frankenstein within a discussion of the importance and function of the IRB. Considering the world of science as would have appeared in 1790 when Victor was a student at Ingolsta...

Stages of institutional review board activities.

Supplementing the Traditional Institutional Review Board with an Environmental Health and Community Review Board

BACKGROUND Community-based research often involves additional ethical, legal, and social considerations beyond those of the specific individuals involved in the study. The traditional institutional review board (IRB) typically focuses on protecting the rights and ensuring the safety of the individuals involved. For projects involving community members, IRBs should be more sensitive to issues re...

The Responsibility of the Institutional Review Board in Good Clinical Practice: First, Do No Harm

Dear Editor,I read with interest the article on outpatient management of burn wounds published in a recent issue of the IJMS.1 There are many questions that arise which are worth mentioning. Under the methodology section, no description was provided on how patients were randomized into the two treatment arms and, therefore, it is not possible to assess how confounding variables were controlled....