WSU Research News, Winter 1998

A twelve page newsletter of the WSU Research News. The WSU Research News was published monthly beginning in June of 1968 and issued by the Office of Research Development. This newsletter was created to provide information to the WSU faculty about the availability of outside funds for research and educational programs, new developments that may affect availability of funds, and general information on research and educational activities at Wright State University.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/wsu_research_news/1173/thumbnail.jp

Patients and Biobanks

The question about the privacy of medical information can be stated simply: To what extent can and should patients control what the medical record contains and who has access to it and for what purposes? Patients often have apparently conflicting views on this subject. On the one hand, we, as patients, say that we prize privacy and that we fear that information will be used to harm us. On the other hand, we value the benefits that come from improved communication among providers, such as having our visits covered by third party payers and advances in medical science, which often come from researchers and providers having access to large data sets. These apparently contradictory desires are not unique to health care. In many other arenas of life, we sell information about ourselves incredibly cheaply, as the grocery and drug store discount tags on our key chains attest. But areas of discomfort remain, one of which I will explore: the use of the contents of the electronic record for medical research. Evolving practices in this area raise a host of questions

Financing Clinical Research and Experimental Therapies: Payment Due, But from Whom?

This article will explore the realm of clinical research and the question of who should finance such research. The first part will define the various types and levels of clinical research in terms of the regulatory controls and oversight applied to such research. Then the article will summarize how the costs of clinical research and experimental therapies have been covered in the past. Finally, the article will evaluate the risks and benefits derived by the various stakeholders and propose a financing rationale for therapies that places the burden of cost squarely on the stakeholders most likely to benefit

Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, October 5-6, 1995

Minutes from the Wright State University Board of Trustees Meeting held on October 5-6, 1995

Playing God: The Legality of Plans Denying Scarce Resources to People with Disabilities in Public Health Emergencies

Public health emergencies can arise in a number of different ways. They can follow a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. They may be man-made, such as the September 11 attacks and the anthrax scare. They may also be infectious. While no pandemic flu has yet reached the severity of the 1918 flu, there have been several scares, including avian flu and most recently H1N1. Few questions are more ethically or legally loaded than determining who will receive scarce medical resources in the event of a widespread public health emergency. The answer will often mean the difference between life and death for affected Americans. Despite this reality, or perhaps because of it, there has been little guidance from the federal and state governments on how to prioritize distribution of those resources among individuals. To fill this gap, some public health and medical organizations promulgated protocols that set forth a hierarchy of resource allocation in response to the predicted H1N1 pandemic. Although these efforts at advance planning are to be lauded, they raise a number of troubling civil rights issues. Several of the protocols exclude some people with disabilities from receiving care even when their disabilities do not affect the likely success of the medical interventions at issue. Both the legality of such plans and the ethical implications of promoting the health of the community at the expense of people with disabilities are highly problematic. This Article explores the legality of the proposed allocation protocols under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act. It also evaluates their compatibility with the ethical principles that guide public health decisions and discusses their implications for people with disabilities in the preplanning for public health emergencies

Personhood, Discrimination, and the New Genetics

Decoding the human genome and identifying genetic sequences may provide, among other things, for the production of individually tailored drugs, for medicines without side effects, and perhaps eventually for gene therapy that will replace dysfunctional genes with genes that preclude or cure illness. But, the same developments threaten society with the potential for devastating biological accidents, with broad invasions of individual and communal privacy, and with genetic bigotry and the revival of eugenic policies. Behind the concrete promises and threats that attend the new genetics lies another sort of change-more subtle than those more usually, and more easily, described and assessed, but as important. In particular, developments in molecular biology will likely alter-and in certain contexts have already begun to alter-the ideological frame within which people define themselves and their actions. This Article identifies and explores the ramifications of one such change. This change involves a fundamental shift in the locus of social value from the autonomous individual-long the central agent of thought and action in most domains of life\u27 in the post-Enlightenment West-to a larger whole, defined through the presumption of a shared genome. Among the consequences of this change are two evolving conceptions of a genetic family and a genetic ethnic group. Each threatens to eviscerate a set of basic values related almost exclusively to the autonomous individual. Among those values are privacy, equality, and choice. This Article focuses on potential consequences of this shift in the locus of social value for familial and for ethnic and racial groups.\u27 The widespread availability of genetic information may create, and appear to validate, negative images of groups defined through reference to DNA and alter understandings of personhood that now prompt the law to protect privacy, and to prohibit ethnic and racial discrimination

The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards

Do federal regulations on Institutional Review Boards violate the First Amendment? Do these regulations establish a new sort of censorship? And what does this reveal about the role of the Supreme Court

The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards

Do federal regulations on Institutional Review Boards violate the First Amendment? Do these regulations establish a new sort of censorship? And what does this reveal about the role of the Supreme Court