For nearly 40 years, the federal government has enforced the “Common Rule.” The rule required researchers in the social and medical sciences to get the approval of an independent review board, or IRB, for their federally funded experiments. The purpose of the boards, which are usually set up by the researchers’ universities, is to protect human research subjects—college students, usually—from potentially harmful experiments. The most infamous example is the Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, which allowed syphilitic patients to go untreated for decades in the name of medical research.
Nothing like Tuskegee is taking place today, so far as we know. Even so, the IRBs serve as a useful stay against overenthusiastic researchers whose sense of their own virtuous mission might lead them to disregard the consequences of their research methods. After all, scientific researchers—the producers of all that “data” that big thinkers are forever citing in service of one special interest or another—sit pretty high in the saddle these days.
Now those researchers think they ought to be policing themselves. And federal regulators seem to agree.
In January the Department of Health and Human Services relaxed its regulations governing the use of the review boards. For example, psychological researchers who believe their experiments entail only “benign behavioral interventions” can exempt themselves from seeking the approval of their IRB, so that once they have all their human guinea pigs lined up, they can just let ‘er rip, scientifically speaking.
The new rule won’t take effect until next year, and not everyone likes the change. Tom George, a bioethicist at the University of Texas, told the New York Times: “There seems to be a major paradigm shift going on away from the original goal of the IRB to protect human subjects and toward the convenience of researchers in the name of so-called efficiency. I find that of deep concern.”
The Scrapbook does too, and not only because we mistrust anything done in the name of “efficiency.” Drunk with the deference journalists and laypeople show them, social scientists of all sorts are throwing off the shackles of professional norms. To cite another example: According to NPR, members of the American Psychiatric Association are hoping to repeal the APA’s “Goldwater Rule,” which forbids members from pronouncing on the psychological health of public figures whom they haven’t examined personally. Its name comes from the notorious magazine story in 1964 that reported more than a thousand head-shrinkers had declared then-candidate Barry Goldwater psychologically unstable.
Unburdened by the Goldwater Rule, APA members will at last be free to pronounce that any public figure they disagree with is nuts. You don’t suppose they’re thinking of Donald Trump, do you? Whatever you think about the various screws loose in the president’s psyche, the confusion of professional judgment with political belief would be a terrible development.
It pains the Scrapbook to find itself on the side of regulations and gag rules. But the exalted role social scientists have assumed in the public conversation requires that we view them with redoubled scrutiny and skepticism. “Trust Us, We Know What We’re Doing” is a suspicious motto for any profession.
