Using Research to Advance:The Institutional Review Board: A Brief History of Attempts to Protect Human Subjects in Research
Paul A. Buelow PhD
Janice Buelow PhD, RN

$3.95 		Clinical Nurse Specialist: The Journal for Advanced Nursing Practice
December 2011 
Volume 25  Number 6
Pages 277 - 280
 
  PDF Version Available!

ABSTRACT
When a nurse begins or joins a research project involving human subjects, he/she will face ethical questions such as "does the project place these subjects at risk of harm, and if so, does the potential benefit outweigh the risk?" and "How can I be certain that the subjects are freely consenting to what is actually going to happen?" To obtain a relatively certain answer to questions like these, the nurse's institution will ask the researchers to explain the project's aims and methods in great detail. The proposed research will be approved only when representatives of the institution who have been designated as "gatekeepers" for human subject research are satisfied that consent is adequately informed and free of coercion and that the potential for harm is negligible or that likely benefits are more important than possible harm. Those institutional representatives make up what has come to be known in America as an institutional review board (IRB). Typically, they act according to ethical guidelines accepted nationally and even internationally. The IRB acts as "another pair of eyes" looking very carefully at research proposals, often from a different or wider viewpoint than that of the researcher.1 Without IRB approval, an institution will not host a human subject research word division. Because this kind of review-approval procedure carries so much authority, it would seem likely that it has played a big part in the history of research. However, the IRB is a relative newcomer.After World War II ended, Nazi leaders faced trial in Nuremberg, Germany, for war crimes. In December 1946, a group of 23 Nazi physicians and camp officials were brought before an American military tribunal on charges of participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The accusations stated that they had used prisoners as human subjects in experiments, neither requesting nor receiving consent. The defendants were accused of freezing the prisoners, injecting them with bacteria or viruses,

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