Ignorance is neither bliss nor ethical

Northwestern University Law Review

Volumn 101, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 809-836

  Mueller, John H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

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EID: 34547988077     PISSN: 00293571     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (111)

1. See National Research Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-348, § 474, 88 Stat. 342, 352-53 (1974).
2. I will not review the thirty-year history here, originating from the National Research Act of 1974, see id., and as many others have done so elsewhere during this symposium. See, e.g., MARK ISRAEL & IAIN HAY, RESEARCH ETHICS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS (2006).
3. Of course, if the goal were explicitly specified as zero risk, then most people would realize that IRBs engage in an impossible exercise. However, not all understand the limits to risk determination, as in this excerpt from the IRB instructions at one large western Canadian university: "[B]oth identifiable and unforeseen risks must be considered." UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY, UNIVERSITY POLICY AND PROCEDURES, ETHICS IN HUMAN RESEARCH-ETHICS REVIEW OF RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN SUBJECTS 8 (1999), http://www.ucalgary.ca/uofc/research/ documents/ethics.pdf. Few, except perhaps Nostradamus, would reasonably accept that challenge.
4. C.K. Gunsalus et al., The Illinois White Paper - Improving the System for Protecting Human Subjects: Counteracting IRB "Mission Creep" 3 (The Center for Advanced Study, U. IU. L. & Econ. Research Paper No. LE06-016, 2005), http://www.law.uiuc.edu/conferences/whitepaper/papers/ SSRNid902995.pdf;
5. see also Gunsalus et al., Editorial, Mission Creep in the IRB World, 312 SCIENCE 1441 (2006);
6. Kevin D. Haggerty, Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics, 27 QUALITATIVE SOC. 391 (2004).
7. See John Mueller, Best Practices: What Perspective, What Evidence? 15 J. SOC. DISTRESS & HOMELESS 13, 14, 18 (2006).
8. See Philip Hamburger, The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards, 2005 SUP. CT. REV. 271.
9. BERTRAND RUSSELL, INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY 71 (1919). This sentiment is captured in social cognition research as "wishful thinking," "self-serving bias," "confirmatory bias," and similar self-explanatory conceptions. Id.
10. Videotape: Evolving Concern: Protection for Human Subjects (National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration 1986) (on file with Office for Human Research Protections, Department of Health and Human Services) [hereinafter Videotape: Evolving Concern], available at http:// videocast.nih.gov/ram/evolving.ram.
11. Richard M. O'Brien, The Institutional Review Board Problem: Where It Came From and What to Do About It, 15 J. SOC. DISTRESS & HOMELESS 23, 33-35 (2006).
12. Likewise, the various forms of faking research and data fraud will not be stopped by the IRB reviews, nor will plagiarism, nor will malfeasance, nor can IRB reviews prevent simple human error. As undesirable as such misbehavior may be, campus IRB procedures cannot prevent them, so the incidents are also logically irrelevant to establishing a need. Misconduct by government agencies likewise does not vindicate the campus censorship by academic IRBs in the social and behavioral sciences; misconduct by government agencies, including the military, merely illustrates the old maxim about doing as I say and not as I do. It may be possible to conclude from these historical cases that government research should not be allowed, but that is another matter altogether.
13. See, e.g., JOHN FEKETE, MORAL PANIC: BIOPOLITICS RISING (1994).
14. Alston Chase, Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, June 2000, at 41, 53-58 [hereinafter Chase, Making of the Unabomber]
15. see also ALSTON CHASE, HARVARD AND THE UNABOMBER: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST (2003) [hereinafter CHASE, EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST].
16. Other innuendos in the article have to do with alleged military involvement in Murray's research, and his alleged use of psilocybin via an association with Timothy Leary and LSD. See Chase, Making of the Unabomber, supra note 12, at 58. If memory serves me, there was a fair amount of drug use on campus, not just in military labs, without coercion by mad scientists!
17. Of course, by Chase's argument, anyone who participated in pre-IRB psychology experiments and later committed a crime now has this alibi. Perhaps this is good news, maybe we can expect crime rates to drop dramatically as IRB influence spreads. Was Timothy McVeigh also in Murray's or a similar experiment?
18. Ironically, Chase seems upset that Harvard would not violate the original assurance of subject anonymity and confidentiality in Murray's research to prove his thesis that "purposely brutalizing psychological experiments" turned Kaczynski into the Unabomber; that is, he seems to favor suspending the research ethics rules when it suits his cause. See Chase, Making of the Unabomber, supra note 12, at 41.
19. See Chase, Making of the Unabomber, supra note 12, at 62.
20. See E.L. Patrullo, Modesty Is the Best Policy: The Federal Role in Social Research, in ETHICAL ISSUES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH 373, 373 (Tom L. Beauchamp et al. eds., 1982);
21. Edward L. Patrullo, Institutional Review Boards and Social Research: A Disruptive, Subjective Perspective, Retrospective and Prospective, in NIH READINGS ON THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN SUBJECTS IN BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH 10, 13-14(Joan E. Sieber ed., 1984) [hereinafter Social Research];
22. see also Edward L. Pattullo, Governmental Regulation of the Investigation of Human Subjects in Social Research, 23 MINERVA 521 (1985). The rate of adverse incidents was very low, and the severity of the few that were even claimed was very minor.
23. See Hamburger, supra note 6, at 333-41. Further, in the 1980s, federal authorities estimated that 80% of social and behavioral research would fall into the exempt category.
24. See Charles R. McCarthy, The IRB and Social and Behavioral Research, in NIH READINGS ON THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN SUBJECTS IN BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH 8, 8-9 (Joan E. Sieber ed., 1984). It seems unlikely that would have been their judgment had there been any evidence of widespread abuse.
25. See CHASE, EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST, supra note 12,at262.
26. In fact, the 10% figure may be high for 1952; personally I know all too well that federally funded social science research even twenty years later was a novelty and a luxury. Interestingly, a recent article reports that even now nearly 80 percent of all research projects reviewed by the University of Chicago's Social Science IRB are personally funded, privately funded, or unfunded. See Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board, ACADEME, Sept.-Oct. 2006, at 95, 98 (2006) (citing Richard Schweder, Protecting Human Beings and Preserving Academic Freedom: Prospects at the University of Chicago, 33 AM. ETHNOLOGIST 507 (2006)).
27. See Stanley Milgram, Behavioral Study of Obedience, 67 J. ABNORMAL & SOC. PSYCHOL. 37178 (1963);
28. STANLEY MILGRAM, OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY: AN EXPERIMENTAL VIEW (1974). In these experiments, subjects were led to believe that they were administering electric shocks to a person in another room. They were induced to progressively increase the shock levels, and did so. This deference to arbitrary authority surprised and disappointed many.
29. See Philip G. Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University (2006), http://www.prisonexp.org/;
30. see also C. Haney, W.C Banks, & P.G. Zimbardo, Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison, 1 INT'L J. CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY, 69, 72-88 (1973). In this experiment, college students were designated as prisoners or guards, and the prisoners were put in cells and had to role play by obeying the guards. The situation became confrontational and even mildly abusive, even though the prisoners voluntarily showed up for several days running.
31. This touches on a recurrent question Why do journalists have a freer hand in public research than well-trained academics? See, e.g., Christopher Shea, Don't Talk to the Humans: The Crackdown on Social Science Research, LINGUA FRANCA, Sept. 2000, at 26, 34.
32. See FRANK FUREDI THE CULTURE OF FEAR: RISK-TAKING AND THE MORALITY OF LOW EXPECTATION (2002);
33. CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS & SALLY SATEL, ONE NATION UNDER THERAPY: HOW THE HELPING CULTURE IS ERODING SELF-RELIANCE (2005);
34. ROGERS H. WRIGHT & NICOLAS A. CUMMINS, DESTRUCTIVE TRENDS IN MENTAL HEALTH: THE WELL-INTENTIONED PATH TO HARM (2005).
35. The BBC replication was not mentioned, but the question of "reality TV" in general and IRB approval has been discussed, unofficially and largely facetiously, without answering the real question of why academics are forbidden to do what other citizens can freely do. See Barbara A. Spellman, Could Reality Shows Become Reality Experiments?, APS OBSERVER, Mar. 2005, at 34, 35. Any number of classic television shows, such as "Candid Camera," would be disallowed on campus, even though they clearly were harmless (albeit not always tasteful perhaps).
36. See D.L. Rosenhan, On Being Sane in Insane Places, 179 SCI. 250 (1973).
37. See JOHN STOSSEL, GIVE ME A BREAK: HOW I EXPOSED HUCKSTERS, CHEATS, AND SCAM ARTISTS AND BECAME THE SCOURGE OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA (2004).
38. Editorial, Time to Cut Regulations that Protect Only Regulators, 414 NATURE 379 (2001).
39. Actually, the strategy of sending sane people to an insane asylum is well understood by the citizenry in many countries, so in a sense it seems unethical to remain uninformed on the matter.
40. See RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF SOCIAL-BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH RESULTING IN HARM TO HUMAN SUBJECTS OR PERCEPTION OF CONTROVERSY (2006), http://orsp. rutgers.edu/Humans/SBHarms.pdf.
41. See infra notes 64-69 and accompanying text (discussing Loftus and Guyer).
42. See RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, supra note 29. For this description to be a fair representation of what occurred, it would have to be rewritten as follows: "the PI was accused of violating numerous privacy rights of one subject as well as numerous research integrity practices."
43. Carol Tavris, The High Cost of Skepticism, 26 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, July/Aug. 2002, at 41, 43.
44. I have tried to correct this by writing to the apparent maintainer of the document, but with no change to date. One can reasonably wonder how widespread such claims of misbehavior actually are when, in fact, they are only accusations.
45. See John Mueller, John Furedy, & Clive Seligman, 'Overkill' by IRBs, 16 APS OBSERVER, Aug. 2003, at 10.
46. See Mueller, supra note 5, at 17.
47. See, e.g., Social Research, supra note 17 (showing that even federal authorities accepted a very low rate of adverse incidents in social science research, and those were minor in adversity); McCarthy, supra note 17 (same).
48. See Raja Mishra, Lapses Cited in Harvard Clinical Trials, BOSTON GLOBE, May 13, 2004, at Al.
49. The federal regulators also deemed the Harvard research ethics committee to be too dominated by white males, without explaining how any demographic subset could have improved on "no problems." Given the absence of harm, this racist and sexist preoccupation reinforces the suspicion that some agenda other than public safety is involved. Harvard seems destined to needlessly spend a lot of money trying to improve on having achieved the medical holy grail of "no harm."
50. "Track records" are an accepted strategy for projection in the private sector, a variant of an old adage in psychological testing: "Past performance is the best predictor of future performance."
51. For example, in response to alleged problems at Virginia Commonwealth University, the result was a 450% increase in IRB administrative personnel (2 to 9), a 250% increase in IRB membership (20 to 50), and a 1875% increase in the budget (from $40,000 to $750,000). See John Mueller, John Furedy, & Clive Seligman, Re: ABCs of IRBs, APS OBSERVER, Oct. 2002, at 7.
52. As an old maxim advises: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." There may be, somewhere at some time, a bureaucracy whose performance was improved by increased resources, but history suggests that such an entity is even less common than a participant being injured in the course of psychological research. In the absence of evidence, we do not even know what to spend more money on.
53. See David C. Whiteman et al., National Ethics Committee Urgently Needed, 178 MED. J. AUSTRALIA 187,187 (2003).
54. See Zimbardo, supra note 21. "Even the 'good' guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work." Id. After 6 days, Zimbardo decided to end the anticipated two-week experiment. "In the encounter sessions, all the prisoners were happy the experiment was over, but most of the guards were upset that the study was terminated prematurely." Id.
55. Bureaucracies expand, often by trivializing the focus of their original mandate. For example, consider the expansion of the concept of "disability," in the Americans with Disabilities Act, that arguably mirrors the distortion of the notion of everyday risk in IRB settings. See STOSSEL, supra note 26, at 202-03.
56. See Research on Human Subjects, supra note 19, at 98.
57. See Tom Puglisi, IRB Review: It Helps to Know the Regulatory Framework, APS OBSERVER, May-June 2001, at 1, 34-35. The commentary in the 1986 NIH training film by Edmund Pellegrino, a medical ethicist who at that time was Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, is also illustrative. See Videotape: Evolving Concern, supra note 8. Such a pious characterization seems to have little purpose other than stifling dissent. The same is true of the more recent fashion to argue that subject safety trumps everything else, when in fact we have not a shred of evidence to indicate that subject safety is affected at all.
58. This should not be a surprise, in that in most other situations where "standards" are imposed they do not become the minimum that they are promoted to be, but rather a soft maximum, given that there is no added profit or incentive for exceeding the required level.
59. Most proposals may be approved eventually, but the revision sends the message about who is in control. Outright rejection is not required; more subtle on-going "velvet totalitarianism" and selfcensorship provide effective censorship without leaving burned books as evidence. See John J. Furedy, Velvet Totalitarianism on Canadian Campuses: Subverting Effects on the Teaching of, and Research in the Discipline of Psychology, 38 CAN. PSYCHOL. 204 (1997). Likewise, you need not be beaten in jail to be coerced; for example, when a junior scholar's research proposal on odor and memory is described as "silly," the message is quite clear.
60. This is colloquially known as a "kangaroo court," and given the secrecy of IRB deliberations it also qualifies as a "star chamber." However, at least one institution has been successful in getting IRB decisions included in the campus' collective bargaining agreement, so an appeal could be a grievance, and the IRB would not be the judge, jury and executioner. This was possible on the grounds that research is a job requirement, a part of the campus holy trinity, "teaching, research, and service." See O'Brien, supra note 9, at 38-40.
61. See Will C van den Hoonaard & Anita Connolly, Anthropological Research in Light of Research-Ethics Review: Canadian Master's Theses, 1995-2004, 1 J. EMPIRICAL RES. ON HUM. RES. ETHICS 59 (2006). Similar research is in progress on theses in other disciplines.
62. See Student Press Law Center, Graduate Student Contests Review Board's Authority to Approve Journalism Research, SPLC REPORT, Fall 2001, at 23; Student Press Law Center, Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Paper's Appeal, SPLC REPORT, Spring 2001, at 17.
63. As described by a colleague: "When the head of it [the IRB] told me a student would need the approval of her office to interview the local member of parliament, or even the student's own mother, if the interview results were to be included in an essay submitted for credit in a course, I concluded that she and I are living in very different worlds." E-mail from Kenneth Westhaus, Professor, Univ. of Waterloo, to John Mueller, Professor, University of Calgary (June 12, 2002, 7:20 PM EST) (on file with author). The time required to route classroom research through the IRB makes it increasingly difficult to incorporate a research experience into a single semester course.
64. This campus coalition of the meek may seem desirable to university administrators, but a wise man once advised: "Be careful what you wish for."
65. Further, to honor the IRB industry's preoccupation with the Nuremberg trials, we should all recall another development in those trials, namely that "just following orders" was not deemed a satisfactory defense.
66. In the 1980s, federal authorities estimated that 80% of social and behavioral research would fall into the exempt category. See McCarthy, supra note 17, at 9.
67. See Mueller, Furedy, & Seligman, supra note 34, at 10.
68. See John H. Mueller, Research Ethics: A New Tool for Harassment in the Academic Workplace, in WORKPLACE MOBBING IN ACADEME: REPORTS FROM TWENTY UNIVERSITIES 290, 291 (Kenneth Westhues ed., 2004).
69. From 1994 to 1997, John Kalbfleisch, among others, wrote many articles in the Montreal Gazette regarding Justine Sergent's suicide. See Document Collection, http://mueller.educ.ucalgary.ca/sergent. txt.
70. Having received approval to use faces as the cognitive stimuli in a brain scanning study, she decided to add another condition, listening to music. Twenty years ago, such a minor variation would have been commonplace without a full reapplication, and it certainly appears to be harmless.
71. As these six cases reveal, it is hardly uncommon for an IRB to employ this double standard, that is, failing to follow its own rules, especially timelines, and yet criticizing the researcher for the least incident.
72. See Charlie Gillis, Professor Again in Hot Water Over Findings, NAT'L POST, Nov. 18, 2000, at A03.
73. Again, a journalist could have conducted such interviews and written about the drug problem without a priori permission, but a trained academic could not. The journalist would, of course, face the eventual editorial decision as would the researcher, but not the a priori review.
74. E-mail from Louis Pagliaro, Professor, Univ. of Alberta, to John Mueller, Professor, Univ. of Calgary (Sept. 13, 2003, 3:38 PM EST) (on file with author).
75. See Tavris, supra note 32, at 42-43.
76. The full recommendation letter itself was not sent to Guyer, and it made use of an additional letter that alleged unethical behavior, also not provided to Guyer. Guyer only learned of these when they surfaced at the U. Washington, having been sent there to aid in the prosecution of co-investigator Loftus. To this day the University of Michigan has not released these communications directly to Guyer. This seems both an ethical and a legal aberration.
77. One doubts this inconsistency will inspire public confidence, yet the lack of repeat reliability is typical of IRB decisions, and committee disagreements are even celebrated as displaying the many "voices" of ethicists.
78. This tactic of self-identifying and then claiming a privacy violation seems to have become standard operating procedure. See J. Michael Bailey, Academic McCarthyism, NORTHWESTERN CHRON., Oct. 7, 2005, at 1.
79. Immigrants from certain regions of the world will readily recognize this strategy, but it is frightening to find it in supposed bastions of free inquiry in North America.
80. Of course, critics of speech codes might well argue otherwise. See, e.g., DIANE RAVITCH, THE LANGUAGE POLICE (2003);
81. ALAN CHARLES KORS & HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE, THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY (1998).
82. Ted Palys & John Lowman, Ethical and Legal Strategies for Protecting Confidential Research Information, 15 CAN. J.L. & SOC'Y 39, 39-40 (2000);
83. see also John Lowman & Ted Palys, The Research Confidentiality Controversy at Simon Fraser University, http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/ Controversy.htm; Russel Ogden v. SFU, http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/OgdenPge.htm. In a later case, on October 27, 2005, Simon Fraser University awarded Criminology M.A. student Tamara O'Doherty a two-semester waiver of tuition fees in recognition of delays to her research program caused by the actions of the Research Ethics Board.
84. D. Todd, Academic Wins Ruling on Assisted Suicide Research, VANCOUVER SUN, Nov. 1, 2003, at B3;
85. see also Exeter Pays Canadian Prof $140K Damages, http://www.caut.ca/en/bulletin/issues/ 2003_nov/news/exeter.asp. From Ogden's two experiences, it appears that the foibles of the research ethics industry and university administration are more replicable than the benefits.
86. See RAVITCH, supra note 69;
87. KORS & SILVERGLATE, supra note 69.
88. See J. MICHAEL BAILEY, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE QUEEN (2003).
89. Many other research areas are similar in starting without formal hypotheses-for example, ethnography. See Catherine Scott, Ethics and Knowledge in the Contemporary University, 6 CRITICAL REV. INT'L SOC. & POL. PHIL. 93 (2003);
90. Jack Katz, Ethical Escape Routes for Underground Ethnographers, 33 AM. ETHNOLOGIST 499 (2006). This misunderstanding seems to be a by-product of using medical research as a model. The term "protocol" (i.e., recipe, or algorithm) seems to derive from medical research, specifically the profitable clinical trials where the procedures are highly standardized, being more like Consumer Reports product testing than research in general. Medical protocols have developed in large part as a way to deflect liability, and likewise "good clinical practices," but exporting these concepts to review social-behavioral projects yields many distortions. Social science subjects are seldom "patients," and the research method of choice is not always based on precedent; in fact, a contrarian approach is often most productive.
91. See Bailey, supra note 67, at 2-3.
92. See RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, supra note 29.
93. See Jeanne Lenzer, Researcher to be Sacked After Reporting High Rates of ADHD, 330 BRIT. MED. J. 691 (2005).
94. The drug pacifies rambunctious children, typically boys, and thus makes classroom management easier for the schools and teachers. Many parents worry about the side-effects; others favor it because the children are also easier to handle at home. And, of course, the drug provides larger profits to the manufacturer as more children take it. Whether the drug is over-prescribed is difficult to say because the condition is so loosely defined, but it is generally accepted that the number of diagnoses and thus the number of prescriptions have increased over the years.
95. A good example of this was the Nancy Olivieri case at the University of Toronto, where she went public about the apparently harmful effects of a drug after her supervisors did nothing. Over a 16-month period, Olivieri was harassed by her University because "she complained about the conduct of the hospital's medical advisory committee, noting it: heard witnesses in secret, failed to allow Dr. Olivieri's counsel to cross-examine witnesses, [and] failed to disclose documents or respond to her lawyer's requests for information." Marina Jimenez, Olivieri Case Referred to Regulatory Body, NAT'L POST, Apr. 28, 2000, at A08. Eventually Olivieri won, for doing the right thing.
96. See A.M. Viens & J. Savulescu, Introduction to The Olivieri Symposium, 30 J. MED. ETHICS 1, 2-5 (2004).
97. See Jeanne Lenzer, Researcher Cleared of Misconduct Charges, 331 BRIT. MED. J. 865, 865 (2005).
98. There are some others not included here involving even senior faculty who elected not to be identified, because continuing to relive the ordeal was too stressful, even after having been found innocent. Hunkering down in the trenches and carrying on has been a strategy for coping with IRB hassles for scholars over the years. This strategy may provide some psychological relief to individuals, but it serves to hide the extent of the IRB problems and speaks volumes about the failure of the censors to create an ethical research environment on campus.
99. It seems that these abuse cases may be more common in non-medical research, where censorship is more likely to be ideologically-motivated. There are other recent developments that involve political intrusions in social science research and journals. See, e.g., Judith H. Langlois and Lynn S. Liben, Child Care Research: An Editorial Perspective, 7A CHILD DEVELOPMENT 969 (2003);
100. Scott O. Lilienfeld, When Worlds Collide: Social Science, Politics, and the Rid et al. (1998) Child Sexual Abuse MetaAnalysis, 57 AM. PSYCHOLOGIST 176 (2002). Indeed, Science magazine pulled an article on the different ways men and women think: "The journal considered the article for seven months and, after making a number of changes, gave Mr. Lawrence a publication date, proofs and a chance to order reprints. But at the last minute he received an e-mail from Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief, in which he said that the journal was not going to publish the article."
101. See Roger Highfield, Scientists Are Split on the Different Ways Men and Women Think, TELEGRAPH ONLINE, July 2, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2006/02/07/ ecnthink07.xml&%5ClsSheet=/connected/2006/02/ 07/ixconn.html. The article was then published on-line by the Public Library of Science (Biology).
102. See PETER A. LAWRENCE, Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science, 4 PLOS BIOLOGY 19, available at http://biology.plosjoumals.org/perlserv?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/ joumal.pbio.0040019. At one time, IRBs were explicitly directed away from using social criteria, but no longer.
103. See, e.g., S. J. Ceci, D. Peters & J. Plotkin, Human Subjects Review, Personal Values, and the Regulation of Social Science Research, 40 AM. PSYCHOLOGIST 994, 995, 1000-01 (1985). There are likely many more of these than have become public as well.
104. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Carrington (May 27, 1788), in THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, at 412 (Paul L. Ford ed., 1904) ("The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.").
105. See, e.g., Marjorie A. Speers, Accreditation Helps Researcher and Subject Alike, APS OBSERVER, May 2003, at 9-10.
106. This situation can hardly be dismissed as another unintended consequence because it has long been acknowledged that federal funds can corrupt scholarship: "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present-and is gravely to be regarded." Dwight Eisenhower, Presidential Farewell Address (Jan. 17, 1961), available at http://www.eisenhower. archives.gov/farewell.htm. One is tempted to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's observation to the effect that "[t]hose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," see 6 THE PAPERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 242 (Leonard W. Labaree ed., 1963), along modem lines as "he who would sacrifice liberty for grant funding deserves neither?" Or to paraphrase yet other ancient advice, "he who pays the piper calls the tune" - so at least be sure that you get a really good price?
107. Consider an analogy: One child may misbehave (or make a mistake) in the classroom, so the teacher comes in and spanks everyone? Whether legal or not, this sounds like a better plan for intimidation than correction.
108. See Research on Human Subjects, supra note 19, at 98 (citation omitted).
109. See O'Brien, supra note 9, at 24-26.
110. See, e.g., Douglass K. Daniel, Census Bureau Loses Hundreds of Laptops, AP NEWS MYWAY, Sept. 22, 2006, http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060922/D8K9RCB80.html.
111. See Hamburger, supra note 6, at 306 n.92.