On Ethical Human Research

Over the weekend I completed the IRB training module online. It made me feel like I was being productive despite the fact that I pretty much let my brain languish all weekend and then began trying to pick up the pieces sometime yesterday afternoon.
At its most basic, the module focused on two things: why we need standards of ethical research and a governing body to uphold them, and what those standards are (primarily based on the idea of informed consent). The module teaches about some blatantly unethical experiments conducted in the past 60 or 70 years: Nazi experiments during WWII, thalidomide, and the Tuskegee syphilis study. I didn't need to take an online training course to figure out that those studies were appalling.
The second part goes through the evolution of the nuts and bolts rules governing research with human subjects. Some aspects were interesting and not necessarily intuitive, like obtaining informed consent from minors and persons of diminished mental capacity. Others had to do with conflicts of interest, like who can contribute how much funding to a study of a drug's efficacy.
Overall, most of the module taught things that the majority of people with a moral compass that points somewhere in the general northerly direction could've figured out with little difficulty. Still, having such things institutionalized does provide a greater inducement for conducting ethical research than appealing to some amorphous corpus of social mores.
There was no "quiz;" it just has you login to UT Direct and put in the date and type of training your completed. So if you've been putting this off 'cause you don't like tests, have no fear.
Another post to come later today dealing with some more literature.