Tuesday, March 8, 2011 7:00 AM to 7:45 AM EST
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
MH&B Special Topics Lectures
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These lectures address diverse topics within bioethics and the medical humanities. Speakers are MH&B faculty or special guests we've invited to present. The lectures run every Tuesday from noon to 12:45pm in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie building, during The Graduate School's fall, winter, and spring quarters. Due to public interest, we've made these lectures open to all, inside and outside the Northwestern community. Please feel free to bring a lunch. |
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Zachary M. Schrag, PhD |
The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research met from December 1974 through September 1978. In those four years, harried commissioners and their small staff reported on an impressive array of topics: research on vulnerable populations, specific medical techniques, and general ethical questions. Most famously, the commission produced the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, whose principles have been adopted by almost every university in the United States. Thus, the commission’s claims about the ethics of human subjects research, and its recommendations, remain the foundation for the regulation of much scientific research in the United States and around the world, including social science research.
Unfortunately, the commission lacked experts on the ethics and methods of social science, and the bioethicists among its members and staff dismissed the complaints by social scientists who sent letters and testified at its hearings. As a result, the commission produced inappropriate ethical advice, confusing definitions, and doubtful empirical data that plague researchers, institutional review boards, university administrators, and federal officials to this day.
Speaker bio: Zachary Schrag, PhD, is an associate professor of history at George Mason University and the author of two books: The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (2006) and Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009 (2010). He has written about IRBs for Bioethics Forum, the Journal of Policy History, Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association, and his own Institutional Review Blog, http://www.institutionalreviewblog.com.
Hosted by Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program.
