Ethicists from Carnegie Mellon and McGill universities are calling on the global research community to resist treating the urgency of the current COVID-19 outbreak as grounds for making exceptions to rigorous research standards in pursuit of treatments and vaccines. Their paper, published online today in Science, provides recommendations for conducting clinical research during times of crises.

Classified as: covid-19, Commentary, Medical ethics
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Published on: 23 Apr 2020

I talked this over with McGill University medical ethicist Jonathan Kimmelman, who specializes in the risks of medical experiments and has written a book about them centered on the Jesse Gelsinger case. Of course, he says, money isn’t the only thing that might prevent medical researchers from being perfectly objective -- there’s the desire to be heroes, to beat rivals, and to help patients. A bigger concern is the fact that whatever is driving scientists, they can have blind spots just like everyone else.

Classified as: Jonathan Kimmelman, CRISPR, Medical ethics
Category:
Published on: 23 Jan 2018
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