RESEARCH General Education

REGULATING RESEARCH
Experts to examine rules guiding human-subject protection

Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

4/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A conference April 11-12 at the University of Illinois College of Law will examine the impact of the growing array of regulations for human-subject protection on academic research and academic freedom.

Scholars from anthropology, education, English, history, law, psychology and sociology will look at the ethical, legal and practical implications of the requirement for prior approval by Institutional Review Boards of research involving human subjects – with or without federal funding – on university campuses. Of particular concern is the extension of IRB approval to research in the humanities and social sciences.

"We want to examine how the unintended consequences of hyper-sensitive regulation affects humanities and social science research," said C.K. Gunsalus, the conference organizer. "The extension of human-subject protections from the biomedical sphere to these fields raises serious questions in a university context. Currently there is no thoughtful body of analysis about how to apply the regulations designed for biomedical and behavior research to such endeavors as oral history and journalism."

Gunsalus, an adjunct professor of law at Illinois, said the conference will gather experts from different fields to discuss harm, risk and professional ethics. Following the conference, the scholars plan to develop guidelines that will assist IRBs in assessing research in non-biomedical fields.

Among the scheduled conference speakers:

Richard Campbell, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on "How to Define, Assess and Balance Concepts of Risk?"

Robert J. Levine, professor of medicine at Yale University, on "Overview of Belmont Principles, Ethical Approaches and Current Regulations/Issues."

Cary Nelson, an Illinois professor of English, and Norman Denzin, an Illinois professor at the Institute for Communications Research, on "Cross Cutting/Emerging Issues."

Linda Shopes, past president of the Oral History Association, and Greg Miller, a psychologist at Illinois, on "What is Research? What is an Experiment? What is an Experiment that is Research?"

David Smith, of the Poynter Center at Indiana University, and Matthew W. Finkin, an Illinois law professor, on "What is Harm?" from an ethical and legal perspective.

Bob Steele, director of the journalism ethics program of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, on "What Turns a Person into a Human Subject? How Do We Find and Then Draw the Lines?"

Among the discussants will be Melody Lin of the Public Health Service, Ivor Pritchard of the U.S. Department of Education and Phil Rubin of the National Science Foundation.

The sessions will be held in the auditorium of the Illinois College of Law, 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Champaign. For the schedule and other information, contact Gunsalus at gunsalus@uiuc.edu.