Sunday, July 08, 2012
Missing the modern point
NPR features a book about scientists who experiment on themselves. Rather grisly, and gave the impression that the only reason to do it is pure macho. Maybe the book went into a broader variety of reasons, but the interview missed the main reason in modern times:
Red tape.
Universities, fearing lawsuits from the Anti-Civilization Lawyers Union, have taken 'bioethics' to an absurd extreme. If you want to use student volunteers for anything at all, even asking questions and taping their responses, you must go through a complicated process of review and Informed Consent Forms. This is part of the reason why profs stick to orthodox topics that are guaranteed to make it through peer review. Gambling is just too expensive.
If you want to do something that's genuinely invasive, the Ethics Review Committee will turn you down flat. I bumped into this in 1993 when I was working on an NSF-funded project that involved building an in-mouth transducer and making measurements of formants. There was no electrical danger, but the process included quite a bit of fitting and molding, and the transducer was made of epoxy with piezo-film accelerometers used as microphones.
We knew that the Ethics Committee would require the fitting to be done by an expensive professional like an oral surgeon, and the epoxy and piezo would have to be tested for non-toxicity.
Hell with that. I molded in my own palate and experimented in my own palate. Not macho, just practical!
The experiment was pretty much a dead end, but it kept me employed through a year between bigger projects, so I'm grateful to NSF for approving it.
Red tape.
Universities, fearing lawsuits from the Anti-Civilization Lawyers Union, have taken 'bioethics' to an absurd extreme. If you want to use student volunteers for anything at all, even asking questions and taping their responses, you must go through a complicated process of review and Informed Consent Forms. This is part of the reason why profs stick to orthodox topics that are guaranteed to make it through peer review. Gambling is just too expensive.
If you want to do something that's genuinely invasive, the Ethics Review Committee will turn you down flat. I bumped into this in 1993 when I was working on an NSF-funded project that involved building an in-mouth transducer and making measurements of formants. There was no electrical danger, but the process included quite a bit of fitting and molding, and the transducer was made of epoxy with piezo-film accelerometers used as microphones.
We knew that the Ethics Committee would require the fitting to be done by an expensive professional like an oral surgeon, and the epoxy and piezo would have to be tested for non-toxicity.
Hell with that. I molded in my own palate and experimented in my own palate. Not macho, just practical!
The experiment was pretty much a dead end, but it kept me employed through a year between bigger projects, so I'm grateful to NSF for approving it.
Labels: Ethics
¶ 5:01 PM
