Times are difficult for researchers using human subjects. Over the past few years the federal Office for the Prevention of Research Risk has temporarily lifted the authority of a number of prestigious institutions to do such research. They included, according to the Office of Human Research Protection, OPRR's successor agency, Duke University Medical Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. The suspensions hobbled the expensive, demanding, and complex business of conducting research with human subjects.
"We had some people who were flying in from foreign countries to start on a trial. They arrived and all of a sudden couldn't start on the trial. That has an adverse effect. We also had human subjects and patients who wanted to start on new experimental drugs and couldn't do it because that protocol was closed down," says ...
