I wonder if anyone is doing this with IRB’s? Vanna Belton from Baltimore has been blind for more than five years, but after undergoing surgery where stem cells extracted from her bone marrow were injected into her right eye’s retina and left eye’s optic nerve, she has regained some of her sight. […] The doctor...

The problem is that the IRB system is so fundamentally misconceived that it is virtually a model of how to regulate badly. Good regulation is accountable, but IRBs are effectively answerable to nobody. Good regulation has clearly defined jurisdictional limits, but IRBs may intervene as they wish. Good regulation is guided by clear rules, but...

The trial was paid for by AstraZeneca, the maker of Seroquel XR, and was conducted by Dr. S. Charles Schulz, the head of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. Two of the study participants were living in a residential treatment facility for sex offenders and may have lied about their diagnosis to qualify for the trial....

In this article, I suggest a different and more liberalized path. In Part I,I describe the regulatory metastasis of IRBs and some problems it is causing for social science research. In Part II, I offer some thoughts on the ways in which these problems might arise from the pro-regulatory incentives to which IRBs are exposed. Finally, in Part III,...

This licensing has profound costs for human life. Although there is no scientifically serious empirical evidence that IRBs save any lives by overseeing research under the human-subjects research regulations, it is abundantly clear that they suppress vast amounts of medical knowledge, and they thereby leave large numbers of individuals without the information they need to...