Center News, October 2009
Activities The Center’s Dr. Meg Gaffney and her husband and teaching partner, Dr. Matthew Galvin, recently began a 6 week seminar series on Understanding Conscience in Ethics and Faith Experience at Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis. The short course is offered for all persons at Trinity Church who are interested in conscience development and functioning, and especially those who have the opportunity to shape the development of conscience in young people. During the course participants will engage in conscience sensitive tasks, explore the essential do

Not Reporting Harm: CONSORT and Clinical Trials
In 2004 an extension to Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) to aid in the reporting of adverse events was published (see: Ioannidis JP. PubMed PMID: 15545678), but did it work? Are the studies published in leading medical journals doing a better job of reporting negative “side effects” in clinical trials? Not according to a new review published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In “Reporting of Safety Results in Published Reports of Randomized Controlled Trials,” Isabelle Pitrou and her co-authors conclude “that despite the publication of a CONSORT statement extension fo

Virtue Ethics for CBPR? Research Ethics in the Academic Literature
Community-based participatory research (CBPR), by definition, includes communities as partners in the research process. Therefore, although individual research participants (also known as “human subjects”) may be sufficiently protected, the barriers and risks of full community participation will also need to be addressed. Are the ethical principles of “autonomy,” “nonmaleficence,” “beneficence,” and “justice” enough or do we need more than the principles-based approach of the Belmont Report to resolve the ethical issues in CBPR? In “

OHRP, Columbia and Hetastarch: Research Ethics in the News
Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, in investigative coverage published by the Huffington Post, report that the Office of Human Research Protections have requested Columbia University to notify research subjects that they may “have suffered harms that were a function of the design and procedures of [a] study” conducted a decade ago. According to the Huffington Post, some of the patients in a study (”Effect of different intravenous fluids on thromboelastography during cardiac surgery”) had adverse reactions to a blood-expa

Comparative Effectiveness: Humanities Initiative Grant Awarded to the Center for Bioethics
The Indiana University Center for Bioethics (IUCB) has recently been awarded a $1,300 Humanities Initiative Grant for a new Comparative Effectiveness (CE) project. The official title of the project is, “Ethical and Social issues in Comparative Effectiveness Research: How the Humanities can Contribute to the Developing National Conversation about Research Reform.” It is Co-sponsored with IU School of Liberal Arts, Department of Philosophy and the IU-School of Law Indianapolis,