Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 62

university exists to spread truth, yet IRBs insist on altering
facts in published accounts. (See, for example, the story on
page 53 about the career aspirations of Harvard and Stanford students. The story contains intentional inaccuracy inserted at the insistence of an IRB that was concerned to protect the identity of these students, even though most had
no problem with being quoted by name.)
And even when researchers persevere, the IRB can
function as a drag, limiting what they can achieve. A 2012
study found that preparing and complying with IRB protocols (as well as analogous protocols for animal research)

At the City University of New
York, it took a librarian five
months to get IRB approval
to ask students about their
study habits and their use of
the library. Unsurprisingly,
she says, other librarians
simply avoid any research
involving library users.
"were by far the most time-consuming" administrative burdens faced by researchers with federal grants. While this
survey focused on researchers in all fields, individual social scientists endure similar friction. For universities to do
their best work, they need a better system.

he federal government invented the IRB with excellent intentions. In the mid-1960s, the Public Health
Service learned that a few medical researchers were
doing some troubling things with their grants. Two doctors
had injected cancer cells into elderly hospital patients. They
were sure that their bodies would reject the cancer, so they
didn't bother asking their permission or telling them what
they were doing. Another had tried-unsuccessfully-to
transplant an animal kidney into a human being, without
seeking anyone's approval.
To rein in such cowboys, in 1966 the surgeon general required grant recipients to secure "an independent determination of the protection of the rights and welfare of
the individual or individuals involved." Instead of a federal
agency making the determination, each research hospital or
university would have to establish its own IRB, a local office
responsible for compliance with federal rules.
The need for such bodies appeared even more acute
a few years later, when investigative journalists broke the
news of additional abuses by federal researchers. At the Uni62

September/October 2014

versity of Cincinnati, a researcher had used Army funds to
judge the effect of nuclear combat on soldiers by exposing
dozens of cancer patients-most of them black and poor-
to massive doses of radiation. And the Public Health Service had, for decades, monitored the health of hundreds of
African Americans with syphilis, deceiving them with colored aspirin tablets into thinking they were receiving medical treatment. More than any other research, this Tuskegee
Syphilis Study, as it became known, led to congressional attention and, in 1974, to a statutory requirement that Public
Health Service grants for human experimentation receive
IRB review.
Policymakers figured that if IRB oversight made sense
for medical research, it must also be the right tool for governing social science interviews, surveys, and ethnography.
Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists disagreed, explaining that their work was less predictable-
and less hazardous-than medical experiments and should
not be governed by the same procedures. As one sociology department warned in 1979, "These proposals display
a profound ignorance of social science research requirements, techniques and methodology ... and an unbelievably arrogant disdain for First Amendment protections of
free speech."
Nevertheless, federal regulators proceeded on their
course, adopting a definition of human subjects research
that includes not only medical and psychological experimentation but almost every form of systematic interaction between researchers and the people they study. In other words,
altering someone's DNA in a gene therapy trial or asking
their taste in movies fall into the same broad category.

o be sure, even simple interviews can pose real ethical
challenges. Some social scientists deceive their subjects in an effort to see if they harbor racial or gender
biases that they would not admit (or even perceive) if questioned directly. More commonly, researchers accompany
questions about sexuality, criminal behavior, or other sensitive topics with promises of confidentiality. In a recent case
at Boston College, such promises proved inadequate when
the British government secured recordings of former Irish
Republican Army operatives who had spoken of an unsolved
murder. A good oversight system would teach researchers
techniques for keeping such material confidential, or at
least for avoiding offering assurances that can't be kept.
Unfortunately, in practice IRB review too often turns
into a farcical imitation of ethical deliberation, as boards
obsess over typographical errors or wildly improbable dangers while ignoring empirical evidence about the kinds of
research that have caused trouble in the past. Like other
forms of over-bureaucratization, they can do real damage
to universities.
Most obviously, IRBs hinder research through simple
delay. Even the most basic reviews can take weeks, while a
more complex review by the full IRB can take many months.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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