Research Ethics Policy

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 and health promotion: research, theory, policy and practice.

This special issue of theHPJAdeals with ethics and health promotion. The accompanying editorial focuses particularly on Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) approval for health promotion research, evaluation and quality assurance (QA), based on the first three papers in this issue. In this brief editorial, we introduce the remaining papers, noting some common threads that are woven through th...

Human embryonic stem cells: research, ethics and policy.

The use of human embryos for research on embryonic stem (ES) cells is currently high on the ethical and political agenda in many countries. Despite the potential benefit of using human ES cells in the treatment of disease, their use remains controversial because of their derivation from early embryos. Here, we address some of the ethical issues surrounding the use of human embryos and human ES ...

[Editorial policy on the ethics of human research].

Research ethics review: identifying public policy and program gaps.

We present an analytical framework for use by fellows of the Fogarty International Center-sponsored Advanced Certificate Program in Research Ethics for Central and Eastern Europe to identify gaps in the public policies establishing research ethics review systems that impede them from doing their job of protecting human research subjects. The framework, illustrated by examples from post-Communis...