Ethical appraisal for multi-centre medical research.

The creation of a national ethics committee in Britain has been proposed to overcome some of the problems that researchers conducting multi-center trials encounter in dealing with numerous local ethics committees. Drury identifies three disadvantages to this proposal: 1) it might weaken the authority of local committees; 2) the present system works well by creating ad hoc ethics committees to review major regional and national trials in specialized areas, such as genetics; and 3) there is the danger that a national ethics committee might lose sight of its mandate to review multi-center research and become involved with a wide range of ethical problems.