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 […]
Category: Research Ethics
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 […]
Too much or too little? A summary of the forum on financial incentives to participants in health and breastfeeding research
By Rasita Vinay and Annina Bauer. On 13th April 2022, the third webinar for the Forum of Global Health Ethics webinar series took place, focusing on the issue of offering financial incentives to participants in health and breastfeeding research. Offering financial incentives to research participants is a common practice in health research; however, its use […]
How much should you trust research ethicists’ warnings about public distrust?
By Nir Eyal In many places around the world, declining levels of public trust in health officials, medical advice, and medical products are causing damages to personal and public health. For example, distrust is a major contributor to the low uptake of COVID-19 vaccination in many countries. Understandably, bioethicists seek to heed the potential of […]
When context calls: EFBRI – An Evolving Ethical Framework Informing Breastfeeding Research and Interventions
By Michaela Hefti and Rasita Vinay. Currently, there are no specific ethics guidelines informing biomedical research in breastfeeding and lactation – despite the potentially vulnerable populations involved. On 10 March 2022, EFBRI – An Evolving Ethical Framework Informing Breastfeeding Research and Interventions, was introduced via a LactaWebinar to address this gap and discuss the practical […]
Why we should not extend the 14-day rule
By Bruce P. Blackshaw In 1978, the first baby conceived by IVF was born in the UK, and public concern about how rapidly science was advancing resulted in a government inquiry being set up. It produced the Warnock Report, which recommended (amongst other things) that human embryos could be cultured in vitro for no longer […]