A recent New York Times article about human research ethics piqued our interest. The story addresses an ongoing discussion about the ethics of a proposed research study in which the participants are to be infected with the Zika virus. What struck us about the article is that it is basically a summation of that unavoidable tension between researchers and ethics reviewers — researchers just want to do their research, and reviewers just want to protect human subjects as much as possible. It can take some doing to get everybody to see that ultimately, we all want the same thing.
After much digging, we were able to find the original Science journal article behind the news story via the UAMS library. If the link here doesn’t work, please contact the IRB Blog’s Original Source Materials Department for a copy at paalediths@uams.edu.