Institutional Review Blog: Archival Edition

For some time, I have been meaning to create an archival backup of this blog, not dependent on Google's whims. With the help of BlogBooker and the Mason Archival Repository Service, I have posted a PDF of all the entries and comments on this blog from its launch in December 2006 through the start of this week. The compilation and individual entries can be downloaded under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Public Health Scholars Question Bioethics Framework

Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns, both with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, find that bioethics is "the wrong framework of accountability for some domains of inquiry."

[Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns. “Beyond Bioethics: Reckoning With the Public Health Paradigm,” American Journal of Public Health 102, no. 8 (August 2012): 1447–1450, DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.300661.]

IRBs Impeded Harvard Dissertation on Addiction and Incarceration

Kimberly Sue, a medical anthropologist in Harvard's MD/PhD program, reports that IRB review can seem "a hassle, a nuisance or a stumbling block, as we seek to enact a more relevant and engaged era of anthropology."

[Kimberly Sue "Are IRBs a Stumbling Block for an Engaged Anthropology?" Somatosphere, 9 August 2012, http://somatosphere.net/2012/08/are-irbs-a-stumbling-block-for-an-engaged-anthropology.html . h/t Michelle Meyer]

Elliott Decries IRB Opacity

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm Blog, Carl Elliott argues that the "by any reasonable estimate [the IRB] oversight system has been a failure . . . yet so many people are professionally invested in the current oversight system that they cannot imagine replacing it, only tinkering with it." He particularly condemns the secrecy of the system.

[Carl Elliott, “When Medical Muckraking Fails” Chronicle of Higher Education, Brainstorm, August 2, 2012.]