Re-Evaluating Risks and Benefits in Human Subjects Research
By Jonathan Kahn, Biopolitical Times guest contributor
| 05. 25. 2011
Modern bioethics is grounded in four basic principles: respect for persons (i.e. autonomy), beneficence, nonmalificence and justice. In a recent presentation at the 2011 ELSI Congress, "Exploring the ELSI Universe," Malia Fullerton, a professor in the Department of Bioethics & Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine, noted that "respect for persons" and "beneficence" have come to be the preeminent values in bioethical review of human subjects studies, particularly in the context of IRB review. Respect for persons typically manifests in a concern for informed consent, and beneficence in a concern for weighing the potential harms and benefits of research. Fullerton argued that a more balanced consideration of the other values, particularly justice and a concern for persons not just in terms of consent but in terms of dignity, needed to be incorporated into such review.
This got me to thinking about these concepts and their deployment in current biomedical research. Beneficence has often been cast in terms of balancing costs and benefits, as though it were simply a utilitarian calculus. However, in the context of...
Related Articles
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...
By Julianna LeMieux, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 07.10.2024
Image by Rama from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 FR
Microbiome research has faced a hurdle from the get-go: the inability to edit the microbial genome in vivo. Until now, bacterial genomes had to be modified outside—and reintroduced...