The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "Institutional Review Board" ...
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Head Games
Alan Pendergast, staffwriter for Denver's Westword reports that in 2004, 20% of Colorado's jail population was diagnosed with severe mental illness, and "the true number may be much higher, since some inmates' illnesses are never properly diagnosed." The story compares cost of psychiatric lock-up versus community mental health care. Pendergast advises other journalists doing similar stories should "insist that someone in the accontable chain of command review and comment on the records, even if the actual treatment providers are refusing to be interviewed."
Tags: prison mental illness; correctional systems; lockdown; supermax prison; ADHD; Department of Corrections; forensic psychiatry; head cases; administrative segregation; HIPPA; San Carlos Correctional Facility; Offenders WIth Serious Mental Illness; OSMI; National Institute on Drug Abuse; Mental Health Occupations Grievance Board
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An inside look at how a university tries to protect human subjects. Federal scrutiny has led Duke to ease the huge workloads burdening its review boards.
This article talks about how universities' Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are overworked, and often times unable to properly evaluate and supervise experiments involving human test subjects. The Chronicle observed and document how Duke university evaluates it's IRB experiment proposals.
Tags: IRB; institutional review board; education; colleges; universities; human test subjects; Duke; professors; school; higher education
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Ethics & Orphans: the Monster Study
In 1939, speech pathologist Wendell Johnson and a graduate student conducted an experiment on a group of orphans near the University of Iowa. Their theory: "Stuttering begins in the ear of the listener, not in the mouth of the child." To test the hypothesis, the researchers conducted a psychological experiment on children starved for attention. Those who stuttered improved with positive speech therapy, but the children who had no trouble speaking were given negative therapy and became chronic stutterers for life. The research was never published and was known at the University as "The Monster Study" for the harm it did to the parentless children.
Tags: stutter; ethics; morality; science; institutional review; orphans; unethical study; human experiments; pathology; Iowa State Board of Control; children; control groups
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Uninformed Consent: What patients at "The Hutch' weren't told about the experiments in which they died.
"PATIENTS DIED PREMATURELY in two failed clinical trials at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center-- experiments in which the Center and its doctors had a financial interest. The patients and their families were never told about those connections, nor were they fully and properly informed about the risks of the experiments ... The patients in these trials were ill with cancers that, left untreated, would almost certainly have killed them. But many stood a good chance of survival or at least prolonged life with traditional care. Instead, many actually died from the experiments --sooner than they would have with no treatment at all."
Tags: conflict of interest; T- cells; bone marrow transplants; clinical trial; disclosure; biotechnology; breast cancer; IRB; Institutional Review Board; chemotherapy; stem-cell transplant; Pentoxifylline; PTX; nonprofit; hospital
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Don't Talk to the Humans: The Crackdown on Social Science Research
Lingua Franca investigates a problem spreading across universities across the country: "the unwarranted and intrusive policing of social science research by human-subject committees." Christopher Shea outlines the problems social scientists have getting their research proposals passed by university review boards. Historians, anthropologists, even journalists are required to present their proposals to these review boards. These review boards were originally set up to prevent researchers from performing disturbing experiments like Stanley Milgram's famous "fatal shock" experiment in the mid-1970s. However, Shea points out, the concerns of the review boards often do not make sense in the context of historical or media research.
Tags: research; social sciences; institutional review boards; IRBs; human-subject