The database fulfills a promise made by DOE Secretary Hazel O'Leary to Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) in January, in connection with hearings into several past DOE human-subject experiments perceived by some to involve unethical levels of risk to inadequately informed participants. Federal regulations, applicable to all agencies, now require informed consent of human research subjects. The new DOE database provides a title, a brief abstract, the funding level, the name of the research institution conducting the work, and the name of the funding agency for each project. There are several ways to access the database residing at the Johns Hopkins University Welch Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics in Baltimore. One is by using the gopher command to reach the gopher.gdb.org server and then selecting the following sequence of menu items: "NIH, NSF, DOE, and Other Funding Agencies"; "DOE--Department of Energy"; and then "The DOE Human Subjects Database."
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