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> which felt super-odd because journalists wouldn't need any ethical review at all in order to carry out exactly the same interview in exactly the same way. Jo
by munin 9y ago
> which felt super-odd because journalists wouldn't need any ethical review at all in order to carry out exactly the same interview in exactly the same way.
Journalists don't have a history of injecting you with syphilis just to see what happens, though.
- schoen 9y agoNeither do anthropologists or computer scientists, who are both now subject to IRB review in universities.
- munin 9y agoComputer scientists will do stuff like expose people in repressive regimes to internet censors (http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p653.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p653....) or hack your Facebook account and slurp all your data (http://www2013.wwwconference.org/companion/p751.pdf http://www2013.wwwconference.org/companion/p751.pdf) Though ENCORE was done with IRB approval, the community is mostly unsure how that was possible...
- schoen 9y agoThanks for the examples. I'd agree that they show that computer science research is capable of harming people. Edit: although I don't think they change my intuition that it's strange that high-risk invasive procedures that people expected to cause grave injury are dealt with by the same oversight mechanism as interviews (even though I'm very convinced of the ethical importance of strong confidentiality protections for interviews). Second edit: I'm also aware that IRBs aren't only inspired by Tuskegee and Nazi experiments, but also by stuff like the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments which didn't involve invasive interventions.
- munin 9y agoIn IRB's that I've participated in, low-risk interviews can go through expedited review, and though it's still happening under the IRB, it's far from the same process as something involving say, injections, imaging, gathering information about potential criminal involvement, or deception. Though, every IRB is different. Which is another problem!
- apsec112 9y agoEvery large group will have some people who commit horrible acts, including the media. "Hate radio", for example, was a major contributor to the Rwandan genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
- goialoq 9y agoPople who are intentionally committing a genocide are out of scope for IRBs, since they are already refusing any kind of oversight because they know what they are doing is wrong.
- occam 9y agoWho has ever done that?
- schoen 9y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in this thread, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment is one of the most important parts of the history of IRBs.
- occam 9y agoTuskegee syphilis experiment, ok. However, as bad as that was, no one was injected with syphilis.
- schoen 9y agoI thought I remembered that the Public Health Service intentionally infected people in order to see what would happen, but Wikipedia seems to say that they intentionally withheld treatment from people who were already infected and deceived them about this, rather than causing the infections themselves (although some of the study subjects spread the disease to other people during the course of the study, which were new infections that could have been prevented by treatment).
- mjevans 9y agoI believe a modern design for this study would compare different kinds of treatment (but not the elimination of treatment... yikes).
- goialoq 9y agoModern policy for medical research is that everyone gets a best available known treatment, and some people also get an experimental unknown treatment.
- 9y ago