David Leslie Harold Hunter

There is considerable controversy about the mandatory ethics review of research. This paper engages with the arguments offered by Murray Dyck and Gary Allen against mandatory review, namely, that this regulation fails to reach the standards that research ethics committees apply to research since it is harmful to the ethics of researchers, has little positive evidence base, leads to significant harms (through delaying valuable research) and distorts the nature of research. As these are commonplace arguments offered by researchers against regulation it is useful to assess their strength and the conclusion that they are taken to support, namely, that we ought to move back to a system of trust in researchers without compulsory regulation. Unfortunately, these arguments are at best weak and to some degree come into conflict in terms of supporting the desired conclusion

At the 5th International Conference on Priorities in Health Care in Wellington, New Zealand, 2004, one resonating theme was that for priority setting to be effective, it has to include clinicians in both decision making and the enforcement of those decisions. There was, however, a disturbing undertone to this theme, namely that doctors, in particular, were unjustifiably thwarting good systems of prioritising scarce healthcare resources. This undertone seems unfair precisely because doctors may, and in some cases do, feel obligated by their professional ethics to remain uninvolved either in deciding priorities and in some cases in enforcing them. I will argue that the professional role of a doctor ought not be considered inconsistent with the role of a priority setter or enforcer, as long as one crucial element is in place, a rationally coherent and broadly justifiable regime for prioritising healthcare. Given this I conclude both that prioritisation and doctoring are not incompatible under certain conditions, and that the education of healthcare professionals ought to include material on distributive justice in healthcare.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 in the United Kingdom clearly represents not a principled approach but instead a compromise, a pragmatic approach which balances several different ethical considerations against each other. In regards to the use of tissue in research it has left much of the more difficult decisions to be made by research ethics committees on a case by case basis. In particular it is now the role of research ethics committees to decide whether research can be carried out using human tissue where no consent was given for the use of this tissue in research. Likewise research ethics committees are now charged with approving of human tissue banks which then need no further ethical approval to carry out research solely using tissue from that bank. There has however been little guidance in regards to the decisions these committees must make. This paper aims to delineate these decisions and offer some philosophical guidance to research ethics committees in making these decisions.

A recurring objection to the exploration, development and deployment of radical new technologies is based on their implications with regards to social justice. In this article, using synthetic biology as an example, I explore this line of objection and how we ought to think about justice in the context of the development and introduction of radically new technologies. I argue that contrary to popular opinion, justice rarely provides a reason not to investigate, develop and introduce radical new technologies, although it may have significant implications for how they ought to be introduced. In particular I focus on the time dependency of justice objections and argue that often these function by looking only at the implications of the introduction of the technology at the point of introduction, rather than the more important long-term impact on patterns of distribution and opportunity.

This paper is, in part, a response to the model of university-based human subjects ethics review described by Bryn Williams-Jones and Soren Holm in Research Ethics Review [1] and the current ethical review process at the University of Ulster [2]. In this paper the two predominant systems of ethical review within UK universities are described. It is argued that each of these systems has significant deficiencies. Having suggested why these two models are less than ideal, a “third way’ of ethical review is proposed that encapsulates the strengths of these two models while avoiding the weaknesses.

The history of the National Health Service research ethics system in the UK and some of the key drivers for its change into the present system are described. It is suggested that the key drivers were the unnecessary delay of research, the complexity of the array of processes and contradictions between research ethics committee (REC) decisions. It is then argued that the primary drivers for this change are and will be replicated by the systems of research ethics review being put in place at UK universities in response to the Economic and Social Research Council research ethics framework. It is argued that this is particularly problematic for multi-centre review and for researchers who switch institutions. Finally, some potential solutions to this problem and their feasibility are discussed