The past few weeks, I’ve been looking for stories to write about here. It seems that everywhere I’ve looked, I have only been able to find (rather whiny) stories about ethics review boards overstepping their boundaries, and putting up barriers to the furtherance of science and research. These stories were, [...]

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights the fact that, on battlefields today, urgency, acuity and need are still drivers for surgical innovation.Here’s the story: On Battlefields, Survival Odds RiseEvery war brings medical innovations, as horrific injuries force surgeons to come up with new ways to save lives. [...]

A recent story from CBC news has uncovered that in the US, clinical trials are being done from which potential participants who identify as gay or lesbian are being excluded. This trend was uncovered by a biostatistician who was gathering data on enrollment into cancer studies and found that, in a [...]

There’s a greater consideration for research institutions to outsource their ethical review boards. But Nancy Walton says the arms-length approach can increase costs and create a board that’s out of touch with the community their overseeing.

Nancy Walton discusses the ethical issues around outsourcing clinical trials, and warns that it’s dangerous to make broad negative generalizations about the “lack” of research integrity in other countries while claiming a kind of moral high ground here in the developed world.

The bad economy is pushing more people to clinical trials. But Nancy Walton says that researchers now more than ever need to be attentive to the motivations that compel participants to join a clinical trial — and appropriately gauge things like incentives, compensation, and how benefit and risk are described.