Newsletter

April 2002

Regulations-A Threat to Scholarship

Nancy Innis

Institutional Review Boards
(IRBs) and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) were established
to protect research participants. In recent years, however, they have expanded
in ways that seem unrelated to their original mandates. As a recent editorial
article, “Time to cut regulations that protect only regulators,” in the
journal Nature (2001, 414, 379) states “much of the research
that falls under the purview of [these committees] does not warrant such
close scrutiny, as it causes little real risk for the study subject or,
in the case of animals, involves generally accepted procedures…” Moreover,
IACUC reviews typically must be completed before a grant application to
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can be considered and, since the
majority of proposals are not funded, much of the research will never be
conducted. Nevertheless vast amounts of researchers’ time is taken up with
completing research protocols and serving on committees to vet the proposals
of others. The article goes on to state that the “climate under which even
routine protocols are reviewed by IACUCs and IRBs is now one of fear –
fear by the institution that it will be ‘out of compliance’ with one or
more aspects of the paperwork, and so subject to penalty upon audit.” Indeed,
the “fear factor” results in absolute absurdities. The article states that
in “some institutions, scientists who never work with organisms more complex
than yeast and bacteria are now being forced to attend lectures on how
to conduct experiments on humans, ‘just in case.’” This is yet another
example of the way in which university administrations have turned away
from promoting and protecting the interests of their faculty by buckling
under government pressure.