By Jennifer O’Neill. Context In early February 2022, my colleague and I embarked upon a programme of research examining our shared interest in patient healthcare involvement. As lecturers at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine, we identified a unique opportunity to establish a staff-student research partnership. The underlying rationale was that our student partners […]
Category: Research Ethics
Genetic research and the collective good: participants as leaders
By Ilaria Galasso and Susi Geiger. Medical ethics has long centered around the question of how to balance the public or common good with individual rights. Different approaches to ethics would prioritize different values in the context of medical research participation. Well-established moral principles provide solid arguments both for an obligation to participate in medical […]
Reflections on the misrepresentation of one’s work
By Richard B. Gibson. In 2020, I published an article called No Harm, No Foul? Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Metaphysics of Grievous Bodily Harm. The piece highlights the lack of definitional clarity within English and Welsh criminal law regarding what harm is, arguing that the concept’s open to varying interpretations. It uses metaphysics […]
Diversity and inclusion initiatives for laboratory animals?
By Monika Piotrowska. Before the pandemic, an Italian colleague of mine from the biology department and his Polish wife would host elegant gatherings to celebrate the birthdays of their trilingual children. The adults would mingle around a large table that displayed an impressive array of gourmet delicacies while engaging in lively conversations. Occasionally we would […]
Why trusted research environments are not about trust
By Paige Fitzsimmons. In April 2022 the UK Department of Health and Social Care published ‘Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis’. This report, which has come to be known as the ‘Goldacre Review’, recommends the use of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) to facilitate the building of public trust in health data […]
Developing a practical resource to improve the ethical standing of gene therapy trials
By Rosie Munday, Hugh Davies and Stephanie Jones with Oxford “A” Health Research Authority Research Ethics Committee Oxford “A” NHS REC is one of the four UK Research Ethics Committees flagged to review gene therapy proposals. Following the philosopher Mary Warnock’s sage advice “I do not believe you can make moral judgements unless, as far […]
The ethics of OrganEx
By Richard B. Gibson. Nature recently published a study by a team at Yale University in which the circulation and cellular activity of a pig’s vital organs – pancreas, liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and even brain – were restored over an hour after death. While exploratory, the study’s results are nonetheless remarkable, challenging the intuition […]
The secret house: the ethics of research with imminently dying patients
By Nicholas Murphy, Charles Weijer, Marat Slessarev, Teneille Gofton Suppose you need to answer an important scientific question, but the only way to do so is through a research study enrolling critically ill patients who have only hours or minutes left to live. What do you do? Is such a study feasible? It is even […]
Is neoliberalism bad for our health?
By Kate Lyle, Susie Weller, Gabby Samuel, Anneke Lucassen Neoliberalism promotes the rights and responsibilities of individuals to make their own choices and manage their own risks, and as a political approach dominates Western societies. As such, neoliberalism has driven a preoccupation with quantifying and managing risks within society; the idea being that clarifying the […]
We need to eliminate ethics-washing
By Paola Buedo and Marcin Waligora. All of us have heard about ethics scandals in science: big conflict of interests from high level universities, selective reporting in clinical trials, researchers working with potentially dangerous techniques without any regulatory control, retracted scientific articles, and so on. These scandals have an enormous impact on how society perceives […]