Guest post by Alka Chandna How many animals are experimented on in laboratories? It’s a simple question, the answer to which provides a basic parameter to help us wrap our heads around the increasingly controversial and ethically harrowing practice of locking animals in cages and conducting harmful procedures on them that are often scary, painful, and […]
Category: Research Ethics
Saatchi Bill – Update
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It turns out that the version of the Medical Innovation Bill about which I wrote this morning isn’t the most recent: the most recent version is available here. Naïvely, I’d assumed that the government would make sure the latest version was the easiest to find. Silly me. Here’s the updated version […]
An Innovation Too Far?
NB – Update/ erratum here. Ooops. One of the things I’ve been doing since I last posted here has involved me looking at the Medical Innovation Bill – the so-called “Saatchi Bill”, after its titular sponsor. Partly, I got interested out of necessity – Radio 4 invited me to go on to the Sunday programme to talk […]
Adrenaline, Information Provision and the Benefits of a Non-Randomised Methodology
Guest Post by Ruth Stirton and Lindsay Stirton, University of Sheffield One of us – Ruth – was on Newsnight on Wednesday the 13th August talking about the PARAMEDIC2 trial. The trial is a double blind, individually randomised, placebo controlled trial of adrenaline v. normal saline injections in cardiac arrest patients treated outside hospital. In simpler terms, if […]
Consigned to the Index
There’re probably times when all of us have had a solution, and just had to find a problem for it. It’s an easy trap; and it’s one into which I suspect Gretchen Goldman may have fallen in an article in Index on Censorship about scientific freedom and how it’s under threat from disputes about Federal funding in the […]
Resurrectionism at Easter
There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
This will hurt a bit
By David Hunter In a piece titled in a fashion to simultaneously win the internet and cause every male reader to wince, Michelle Meyer asks “Whose Business Is It If You Want a Bee To Sting Your Penis? Should IRBs Be Policing Self-Experimentation?” In this piece she describes the case of a Cornell graduate student […]
An Attack of the What-Ifs
Among the comments to the last post, there’s this from Parmenion59: So…if a cure for lung cancer is found, and the study has been funded through money from a tobacco company…the BMJ won’t publish said study? Way to go BMJ. Hmmm. At least on the face of it, this looks like an important point – […]
Smoking out Tobacco Industry-Supported Research
BMJ Open, along with a couple of other journals, published a statement a couple of days ago saying that they’d no longer accept papers based on research wholly or partially funded by the tobacco industry. The gloss on the statement is damning: The tobacco industry, far from advancing knowledge, has used research to deliberately produce ignorance […]
Research Ethics and Ethical Problems
Noted on Ben Goldacre’s twitter feed a couple of weeks ago was this article in Slate about the recruitment of pregnant women into drug trials. Essentially, there’s a situation in which there’s a dearth of information about the impact of drugs during pregnancy. According to the article, [p]harmaceutical companies are not willing to navigate the […]