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The Ancillary-Care Responsibilities of Researchers: Reasonable but Not Great Expectations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Roger Brownsword
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Extract

It is axiomatic that the first responsibility of researchers, whether they are working in the developed or the developing world, is to (strive to) do no harm to those who participate in their studies or trials. However, on neither side of the Atlantic is there any such settled view with regard to the responsibility of researchers to attend to the ancillary-care needs of their participants – that is, a responsibility to advise or assist participants who have medical condition X in circumstances where the research concerns medical condition Y, and the research did not contribute to the presence of condition X in participants, nor did the having of condition X contribute to the research. Consider, for example, the following hypothetical posed by Leah Belsky and Henry Richardson:

Researchers testing a new treatment for tuberculosis in a developing country discover some patients have HIV infection. Do they have a responsibility to provide antiretroviral drugs?

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 679 - 691
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2007

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References

For an important entry into this question, see Richardson, H. S. Belsky, L., “The Ancillary-Care Responsibilities of Medical Researchers: An Ethical Framework for Thinking about the Clinical Care That Researchers Owe Their Subjects,” Hastings Center Report 34, no. 1 (2004): 25–33; and Belsky, L. Richardson, H. S., “Medical Researchers' Ancillary Clinical Care Responsibilities,” British Medical Journal 328, no. 7454 (2004): 1494–96. There is also a consensus paper on this topic, for which Henry Richardson has taken lead responsibility, and which has been signed by participants at the workshop entitled the Ancillary-Care Obligations of Medical Researchers Working in Developing Countries, held at Georgetown University on October 20–22, 2006 (on file with author).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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I am avoiding presenting this question in the more usual terms of mandatory or optional, or default rules, because I think that these terms are apt to mislead where, as in the text, the setting is that of a community of rights.Google Scholar