IRBs (institutional review boards) came into being in part as a response to pretty egregious violations of human dignity in the name of research (for example th Nazi medical experiments and the Tuskegee syphilis study). The Keystone project is a good case study in how a lot of the issues IRBs deal with are much more subtle. Ethical standards can be violated without researchers committing obvious atrocities. There are often grey areas that are open to interpretation. Read the Gawande and Nosowsky articles (links provided below). In your initial post discuss how the researchers might have done things differently so that the study could have been conducted without violating any ethical standards. Do you think the OHRP ultimately made the right call?
2 pages AMA format
Gawande: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30gawande.html?_r=0
Nosowsky: http://ora.research.ucla.edu/OHRPP/documents/policy/3/P3Nosowsky-QI_v_Research.
