Anyway, about institutional review boards: All IRBs (in the US anyway) are required to have at least one member who is not affiliated with the institution and not in the medical profession. This person should represent the community or lay person’s interests. If anyone is interested in volunteering, most hospitals are interested in to desperate for volunteers for their IRBs. Though a word of warning: they’re generally desperate because being on an IRB is BORING. You’ll spend more time making sure that all the forms are filled out correctly than you will questioning unethical research. Nonetheless, it’s a concrete thing any interested person can do to help ensure better research practices.

I have seen first-hand many many times how the media and “lay” public distorts actual scientific fact to support outrage. I have heard things and seen quotes printed in respectable news publications that are just downright innacurate and based in a complete lack of understanding of the actual science being discussed. Because of this, I tend to read anything regarding science in a non-scientific medium with caution. And I encourage others to do the same. Journalists are usually not scientists. Outraged parents are usually not scientists. Therefore, there is a fairly high probability that they will misread information and have an inaccurate perception of what is actually happening.

Even taking this one step further, I do not even feel comfortable making a judgement about the soil study linked at the beginning of this post because it’s a type of science with which I am not familiar. And I really do not believe I can make any accurate judgement based on what a journalist believes to understand about this scientific study.

As a second point, I would like to discuss two other things. One is the availability of people for research studies and the other is the attitude of the scientists toward the research subjects. Most research subjects are going to be from a low economic class. Money or free medical care are really the only two incentives that a research study can use to find participants. Most people don’t feel an altruistic need to help further scientific research enough to be inconvenienced by participating in a study without those other motivators. So, you find research subjects that need the money enough to subject themselves to clinical trials or need the medical care enough to subject themselves to clinical trials. This generally leaves you with lower economic classes or people suffering from catastrophic diseases that modern medicine can’t cure, yet. Or you have the combination in people that have catastrophic illnesses that they can’t afford to treat.

Unfortunately, many researchers I have encountered have a distanced attitude about research subjects. It may be a protective mechanism. I personally ended up leaving the field because I couldn’t take all the mouse-killing and I never developed a detatched-enough attitude. But I have heard researchers talk about terminal cancer patients as if “well, they’re going to die anyways, lets at least get some benefit out of it with a clinical trial for drug toxicity.” I find this appalling, but how else do you test for drug toxicity in humans? There really is no other way to do it. And testing for drug toxicity is how you find the dosage for a drug where it stops being beneficial and starts harming the patient. Nearly all drugs have this point and if you don’t know what it is, the drug isn’t safe to use. Really, there are no easy answers here.

Okay, what’s the point of this comment? Yes, there are many examples of unscrupulous scientists out there. Yes, there are going to be racists, sexists, heterosexists, ageists, and every other kind of bigot among the population of “scientists” just like there are with every other occupation group. Yes, that is a problem to address (hopefully through holding IRBs accountable for not doing their jobs). But I just want to encourage people to think a bit more critically about these types of stories. For the reasons at the beginning of my comment and for other public health reasons, contributing to a general distrust and outrage against the scientific and medical community is not necessarily a good thing.

The ongoing nature of these medical experiments really is appaling though. Some of this stuff seems more fitting for the laboratory of Josef Mengeles than for a modern democracy. I wish I had some sort of trouble believing these reports, but I don’t. And people still turn round and says racism is a problem of the past.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xpzly_origins-of-aids