Bioethics.net

Background: Individual, comprehensive, and written informed consent is broadly considered an ethical obligation in research involving the sampling of human material. In developing countries, however, local conditions, such as widespread illiteracy, low levels of education, and hierarchical social structures, complicate compliance with these standards. As a result, researchers may modify the conse...

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental ...

Purpose: Secondary use of clinical tissue and data is an increasingly important platform for health research. Many jurisdictions allow research ethics committees (RECs) or institutional review boards (IRBs) the flexibility to waive the requirement for patient consent for secondary research. But most RECs/IRBs conduct their meetings “behind closed doors” and their decision-making processes are...

Background: It has been widely reported that medical trainees experience situations with profound ethical implications during their clinical rotations. To address this, most U.S. medical schools include ethics curricula in their undergraduate programs. However, the contents of these curricula vary substantially. Our pilot study aimed to discover, from the students’ perspective, how ethics pedag...

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among th...

Background: Recent campaigns (e.g., the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Choosing Wisely) reflect the increasing role that physicians are expected to have in stewarding health care resources. We examine whether physicians believe they should pay attention to societal costs or refuse requests for costly interventions with little chance of patient benefit. Methods: We conducted ...

In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted the experimental label on oocyte preservation, but cautioned against women using it to avoid age-related infertility, known as social egg freezing (SEF). In 2014, Facebook and Apple announced that they would offer SEF as a workplace benefit. Within the context of a rapidly growing market for SEF, we were interested in how these ...

Background: In biomedical research, there have been numerous scandals highlighting conflicts of interest (COIs) leading to significant bias in judgment and questionable practices. Academic institutions, journals, and funding agencies have developed and enforced policies to mitigate issues related to COI, especially surrounding financial interests. After a case of editorial COI in a prominent bioe...