Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1743546.1743563
Viewpoint
institutional review Boards
and your research

ReseArChers in CoMPUTer science departments throughout the U.S. are violating federal law and their own organization’s regulations regarding human subjects research—and in most cases they don’t even know it. The violations are generally minor, but the lack of review leaves many universities open to significant sanctions, up to and including the loss of all federal research dollars. The lack of review also means that potentially hazardous research has been performed without adequate review by those trained in human subject protection.

We argue that much computer science research performed with the Internet today involves human subject data and, as such, must be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards— including nearly all research projects involving network monitoring, email, Facebook, other social networking sites and many Web sites with user-generated content. Failure to address this issue now may cause significant problems for computer science in the near future.

art in Development
Prisons and syphilis
At issue are the National Research Act
(NRA) of 1974a and the Common Rule,b
a PL 93-348, see http://history.nih.gov/research/
downloads/PL93-348.pdf
b 45 CFR 46, see http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/hu-
mansubjects/guidance/ 45cfr46.htm
which together articulate U.S. policy
on the Protection of Human Subjects.
This policy was created following a
series of highly publicized ethical
lapses on the part of U.S. scientists
performing federally funded re-
search. The most objectionable cases
involved human medical experimen-
tation—specifically the Tuskegee
Syphilis Experiment, a 40-year long
U.S. government project that delib-
erately withheld syphilis treatment
from poor rural black men. Another
was the 1971 Stanford Prison Experi-
ment, funded by the U.S. Office of
Naval Research, in which students
playing the role of prisoners were
brutalized by other students playing
the roles of guards.