American Institutional Review Board Case Study

Words: 515
Pages: 3

I believe that the American Institutional Review Board (IRB) should make changes to the way in which they operate to ensure that they are enforcing fair and ethical rules regarding research. In my opinion the IRB should give researchers more freedom as long as it is not ill intentioned, does not cause any harm or lead to the abuse of subjects. The IRB is also doing a good job in ensuring the safety of research subjects but a few little changes can make it better for both the researchers and subjects.
The researchers should be given more freedom compared to what they currently have, because as it stands the IRB possesses too much power and abuse it to control researchers. This is portrayed in the fourth case study when a researcher was barred from using her own data because “she paid her human research subjects different amount of money based on their economic status”. However the researcher came up with the money from private funders who entrusted the researcher to do what they deemed. Researchers should also be given the freedom to investigate the groups that the IRB deems to be a “vulnerable population” without having to jump through hoops to get approval. If not, researchers will just choose not to research them at all, which was
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Some of the regulations that should be enforced to ensure the safety of research subjects are; the risks to subjects be minimized before the research begins, informed consent from each subject prior to the research begins and, no deception of the subjects that may put them in any kind of harm. If those regulations are enforced to prevent the abuse of research subjects then it will make it much harder for experiments like the Guatemala Syphilis Experiment that took place in the first case study to ever happen