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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

The IRB process he described did not have a sophisticated understanding of the ethical risks of research. It imposed arbitrary and useless rules on an experiment with few if any risks.

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IRB review procedures are flawed, I agree. But ethical review by a third party is enormously important for research with human subjects. I'm alarmed by the notion of researchers deciding unilaterally that a study has only "nonexistent risks" -- that's a recipe for disastrously unethical scientific conduct.

I don't think the author was proposing getting rid of oversight completely, just that said oversight should, you know, make sense.

The point is that the decision should not have been unilateral - the author and his colleague had a very good case for their position, based on the fact that they were not asking anything that was not being asked anyway, and not recording anything that was not being recorded anyway. It was mindless dogma on the part of the IRB that made it unilateral. Meanwhile, a practice with a real potential for risk went unstudied.

You might argue that there was risk to the patients in the one part of the procedure that was different than what they would experience anyway - the actual asking for consent - but if so, what would you propose doing about it?

You have made a straw man out of this one case, and are defending it with all the dogma displayed by this IRB.

I don't think the author is in any way arguing that research should be completely without oversight. Just that current oversight is uselessly burdensome.

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