2 ms·

... And I'd still like some update on the UMN IRB, which exempted this research. Graduate students will make mistakes, and as much as this was stupid, reckless

... And I'd still like some update on the UMN IRB, which exempted this research. Graduate students will make mistakes, and as much as this was stupid, reckless, and unethical, graduate school is a time to learn. Professors will make mistakes. That's less excusable. IRBs are set up exactly to prevent stuff like this. My experience is they don't work, and UNM's clearly doesn't.

dekhn 5y ago
IRBs are set up to prevent costly lawsuits against the university, although they were originally intended to avoid human experimentation like the nazis (and many eugenecists and other doctors in the US) did.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  There are informal mechanisms as well. Someone will say to a hotheaded or greedy faculty member "look, you can't boot M off this patent, three years ago that other faculty member booted N off a few patents, there were issues, and then we had to pay tens of thousands for all the amended filings!"
- woofie11 5y ago
  This is false. IRBs are required under federal law, which did result from ethics violations, both by the Nazis, but just as much by US-based experiments, like the Stanford prison study, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Yale's Milgram experiment, US-based human radiation experiments, and so on. At some point, we decided we should have ethical research. That's designed to solve a broad set of problems. Most of this isn't about law suits but about federal research funding. There's little private right of action, but if you don't have research reviewed by an IRB, you can't get federal research grants. OMB requires an IRB. That said, universities are finding loopholes. A major one is for profs to do research on "private" time as "consulting." Lots of unethical research being done and published that way. Professors don't really have a clean split between work/life or work 40-hour weeks, so while perhaps this started out reasonable ("I'm consulting to Google"), right now, it's just a way to bypass IRBs. As a footnote: What's not widely recognized in the US yet were the close ties between Nazi research and US research, pre-war. A lot of the eugenics stuff was developed by the American scientific establishment.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I don't know why you're saying what I said is false. What you're describing is the law that makes them obligatory. But that doesn't define the role they play today, which is entirely more subtle than that. They focus on risk reduction for the university, not to ensure ethics. How do I know? Because I've worked with IRBs for years and know exactly what and how they do. I made it quite clear the eugenics was primarily American.

dekhn 5y ago

IRBs are set up to prevent costly lawsuits against the university, although they were originally intended to avoid human experimentation like the nazis (and many eugenecists and other doctors in the US) did.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
There are informal mechanisms as well. Someone will say to a hotheaded or greedy faculty member "look, you can't boot M off this patent, three years ago that other faculty member booted N off a few patents, there were issues, and then we had to pay tens of thousands for all the amended filings!"
woofie11 5y ago
This is false. IRBs are required under federal law, which did result from ethics violations, both by the Nazis, but just as much by US-based experiments, like the Stanford prison study, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Yale's Milgram experiment, US-based human radiation experiments, and so on. At some point, we decided we should have ethical research. That's designed to solve a broad set of problems. Most of this isn't about law suits but about federal research funding. There's little private right of action, but if you don't have research reviewed by an IRB, you can't get federal research grants. OMB requires an IRB. That said, universities are finding loopholes. A major one is for profs to do research on "private" time as "consulting." Lots of unethical research being done and published that way. Professors don't really have a clean split between work/life or work 40-hour weeks, so while perhaps this started out reasonable ("I'm consulting to Google"), right now, it's just a way to bypass IRBs. As a footnote: What's not widely recognized in the US yet were the close ties between Nazi research and US research, pre-war. A lot of the eugenics stuff was developed by the American scientific establishment.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I don't know why you're saying what I said is false. What you're describing is the law that makes them obligatory. But that doesn't define the role they play today, which is entirely more subtle than that. They focus on risk reduction for the university, not to ensure ethics. How do I know? Because I've worked with IRBs for years and know exactly what and how they do. I made it quite clear the eugenics was primarily American.