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Financial Conflicts of Interest in Human Subjects Research: The Problem of Institutional Conflicts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Mark Barnes  and
Patrik S. Florencio
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Extract

In both academic literature and the media, financial conflicts of interest in human subjects research have come center-stage. The cover of a recent edition of Time magazine features a research subject in a cage with the caption human guinea pigs, signifying perhaps that human research subjects are no more protected from research abuses than are laboratory animals. That magazine issue highlights three well-publicized cases of human subjects research violations that occurred at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins University.

At St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a study that was co-sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center investigated an experimental vaccine for malignant melanoma. In that case, the chair of the university's institutional review board (IRB) — the committee within each medical institution charged with ethics review of human research projects undertaken at that institution — and the dean of the University's College of Medicine allegedly concealed from both the IRB and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a report by an outside consulting firm that had found severe deficiencies with the melanoma vaccine study being conducted at the medical center.

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Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Fall 2002 , pp. 390 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002

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