Faculty Bibliography

Human fetal tissue (HFT) has been used in biomedical research for nearly a century and has led to extraordinarily valuable discoveries that have benefitted humankind. Politicization of the use of HFT over recent years has led to the creation of numerous obstacles to scientific progress in this field. In July 2019, the imposition of redundant ethics policies was supplemented with the creation of the Human Fetal Tissue Ethics Advisory Board, which withheld funding of 13 out of 14 NIH grants that were favorably peer reviewed in the Summer of 2020. We believe that these new sets of restrictions are harmful to the goals of scientific progress and call upon the new administration of our government to allow peer review, not politics, to determine scientific merit and to reinstitute the previously existing ethics policies that were more than adequate to assure the appropriateness of human fetal tissue research.

Immorally acquired information from Nazi experimentation or other sources infects the body of scientific and biomedical knowledge. Responding to this reality ethically means insisting on good teaching about the horrific history of such information's sources and careful deliberation about how it is referenced and described.

The federal research misconduct regulations finalized in 2005 did not incorporate important principles regarding human subjects protections articulated in The Belmont Report, yet research misconduct can involve harms to research subjects and to subsequent patients whose treatments are based on false research findings. Consistency with the Belmont principles would require assuring regular monitoring to detect research misconduct, tracing effects of research misconduct on trial participants and informing them of these effects, and assuring timely correction of published reports of research findings if research misconduct related to the study was subsequently discovered. Research misconduct has historically been viewed as a matter for the scientific community to manage; it is actually a threat to the welfare of human subjects and ethically ought to be treated as such.