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Research Ethics
Chairperson
Robert J. Levine, Co-director, Bioethics Center
Advisory Group:
Julius Landwirth, Associate Director, Bioethics Center, Donaghue Initiative in Biomedical and Behavioral Research Ethics
Autumn Ridenour, Program Coordinator, Bioethics Center, Donaghue Initiative in
Biomedical and Behavioral Research Ethics
The “Research Ethics” working group was organized as an activity of the Donaghue Initiative in Biomedical and Behavioral Research Ethics. The group is chaired by Robert J. Levine, with the assistance of Julius Landwirth and Autumn Ridenour. The group is focusing on the ethics of research with human subjects at the end-of-life. Persons at the end-of-life may be particularly vulnerable as potential research subjects. Researchers may seek to recruit terminally ill research subjects when studying interventions that may benefit them as individuals or as a class, or they may specifically recruit subjects with short life expectancy in order to avoid delayed harms from experimental interventions unrelated to the subject’s clinical situation. An example of the latter was a proposed study of the development of mucosal immunity in response to an experimental HIV vaccine in subjects who are terminally ill with unrelated problems. The development of mucosal immunity would then be tested by application of HIV (the virus that is the causative agent of AIDS) to rectal or vaginal mucosa. Those who were not successfully immunized would then develop HIV infection. But since subjects would be selected because they had a life expectancy of less than one year, they would not develop AIDS or any other clinical manifestation of HIV infection. Thus, they would not be harmed by the research interventions. The group selected this project as its case-study scenario.
For more information, contact julius.landwirth@yale.edu or autumn.ridenour@yale.edu