Submitted by medium on Wed, 01/26/2022 - 17:47
CASBS-affiliated scholars are coauthors of a new article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), that seeks to inform and transform the way research is conducted in diverse areas of research and at institutions far and wide.
The CASBS coauthors of “Ethics and Society Review: Ethics Reflection as a Precondition to Research Funding,” include current fellow Michael Bernstein, director Margaret Levi, program director Betsy Rajala, and Charla Waeiss, a consultant to the Center. The other coauthors are David Magnus, a professor of medicine and biomedical ethics at Stanford, and Debra Satz, Stanford’s dean of humanities and sciences (and a 2017–18 CASBS fellow).
At most research institutions, funding of projects is conditioned on the approval of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), which focus only on risks to individual human subjects. The PNAS paper describes an Ethics and Society Review (ESR) board, in pilot form at Stanford University, that compels researchers to consider broader ethical implications and societal consequences that IRBs cannot. It also requires researchers to develop strategies for mitigating potential societal harms of their proposed research. Access to funding is possible only after completion of an iterative ethics and society review process.
The ESR offers a scaffolding for other organizations to consider in the oversight of future research designs. The aim is to help facilitate a cultural shift that guides and improves practices of the research enterprise, and for improved practices to become routine across a variety of disciplines and settings.
CASBS plays an integral role in coordinating ESR’s implementation and evaluation through the Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, a presidential initiative at Stanford co-led by CASBS. The Center gratefully acknowledges the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation for its support of CASBS’s expansion of ESR.
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