Marin Voice: Student guinea pigs at Cal?
By Alan Miller,
The Marin Independent Journal
| 08. 23. 2010
[Quotes CGS's Jesse Reynolds and Marcy Darnovsky]
[Opinion]
FACULTY MEMBERS at major universities such as the University of California at Berkeley learn early on to be very cautious before using students as subjects in any kind of research project.
Human subjects committees and review boards have been established at Cal to protect the rights and welfare of all participants in research conducted by university personnel. Because of potential lapses in the oversight process, however, red flags fly whenever even seemingly justifiable research projects are proposed using large numbers of university students.
So it was that predictable furor arose when the university's College of Letters and Sciences mailed DNA cheek swab test kits to all 5,500 incoming fall semester freshmen and transfer students. The research, to be managed by the biology department, will run genetic tests on the swabs to discover the individual student's tolerance for alcohol, folic acid and lactose.
Although the appropriate human subjects committees on campus approved the project, a bioethics debate - on campus and nationally - quickly arose as the proposal became public.
Although the test results from the swabs would be known in...
Related Articles
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 03.18.2024
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.20.2024
There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime.
Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 03.10.2024
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He...
By Nick Paul Taylor, BioSpace | 03.14.2024
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...