Adventures in Ethics and Science 2008-08-01

Medical research with 'legacy samples' raises ethical questions.

In the July 18, 2008 issue of Science, I noticed a news item, "Old Samples Trip Up Tokyo Team": A University of Tokyo team has retracted a published research paper because it apparently failed to obtain informed consent from tissue donors or approval from an institutional review board (IRB). Other papers by the same group are under investigation by the university. Observers believe problems stem in part from guidelines that don't sufficiently explain how to handle samples collected before Japan established informed consent procedures. The samples in question were "legacy samples", samples that had been previously collected for other research projects. The fact that these samples were collected before the institution of the rules for research with human subjects to which Japanese researchers are now bound complicates the ethical considerations for the researchers. Read the rest of this post... | ...

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