In hospitals, ethics consultations and committees were a product of the 1970s in the United States of America (US). The US administration encouraged their development particularly when the influential 1983 report of the President’s Commission for the study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, entitled Deciding to Forgo Life-Sustaining Treatment, gave a signifi...

The article ‘The ethics of resuscitation’, published in ‘Anaesthesiology Intensive Therapy’ 3/2011, aroused much interest of the readers [1]. It deals with an important and often neglected issue of ethical dilemmas associated with decision making about the institution or otherwise of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The involvement of hospital ethics committees in ‘decision making about the insti...

BACKGROUND Clinical trials throughout the world must be evaluated by research ethics committees. No one has yet attempted to clearly quantify at the national level the activity of ethics committees and describe the characteristics of the protocols submitted. The objectives of this study were to describe 1) the workload and the activity of Research Ethics Committees in France, and 2) the charact...

When ethics committees evaluate the research proposals submitted to them by biomedical scientists, they can seek guidance from laws and regulations, their own beliefs, values and experiences, and from the theories of philosophers. The starting point of this paper is that philosophers can only be helpful to the members of ethics committees if they take into account in their models both the basic...

A decade ago, we reviewed the field of clinical ethics; assessed its progress in research, education, and ethics committees and consultation; and made predictions about the future of the field. In this article, we revisit clinical ethics to examine our earlier observations, highlight key developments, and discuss remaining challenges for clinical ethics, including the need to develop a global p...

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...

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7445/950 Updated information and services can be found at: These include: References http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7445/950#BIBL This article cites 7 articles, 3 of which can be accessed free at: Rapid responses http://bmj.com/cgi/eletter-submit/328/7445/950 You can respond to this article at: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7445/950#responses free ...

BACKGROUND In this article we will describe the process that preceded the establishment of regional committees for medical research ethics in 1985. We will also take a look at the difficult initial period experienced by the committees in the eastern and southern regions. MATERIAL AND METHODS We have examined the material that has been submitted to the National Archives by the Research Council...